Laura’s Winning Ideas

Comparing Microsoft to Apple is a common exercise, and I just read another analysis of why Microsoft is not improving profits and marketshare, but Apple is amazing us. However, the conclusion the author came to is different than my own conclusion.

The problem with organizations is that it is easier to focus on internal politics because the culprits are right in front of you. Of course, this mires the organization in a zero progress game. Everyone is poised to prevent internal disruption of their carefully balanced power base. The bigger the organization, the bigger the problem of internal politics constraining and consuming the creative resources of the organization.

Some analysts think that a fanatical focus on the competition is the difference between Microsoft and Apple. They are wrong.

Focus on the Competition Does Not Improve Results

If you shift the focus to the competition, you are plotting for small advantages in a world where the competitors are one step ahead of you. This will not lead to breakthroughs, and IMHO will spiral down a rabbit hole to mediocrity and “me too-ism.”

Focus on the Customer Renders Breakthrough

However, if you shift the focus to the customer, you have the opportunity to notice something overlooked by the competition. If you focus on the customer, you will be examining the root of the purchase decision, not your competitors interpretation of that purchase decision. You prevent being misguided by a competitors false interpretation if you stay focused on the customer and only monitor the competitor’s responses.

Apple demonstrates this beautifully, with offerings no competitor had invented. Microsoft, well, not so much. They seem to weigh down products with a clear offering, layering on “inventions” from other parts of the organization so that the final product is hard to distinguish from previous offerings and just too muddled to be amazing. Too bad, because the brains at Microsoft are no less brilliant than the brains at Apple. But the environments are very different.

Proposals are Opportunities for Breakthrough Invention

When I’m working on a proposal, I spend little or no time gathering competitor intelligence. Most of it is gossip and innuendo, some of it is just plain incorrect. Instead, we spend time focused on the customer. What keeps them up at night? What part of their mission can we improve? How does our work move the customer forward?

The breakthroughs always come during these discussions. The creative twist that attracts the customer to our proposal comes out in these brainstorming sessions.

The only thing generated by competitor analysis is fear and trepidation, so I avoid it.

My hit rate is solid at 85 percent and going up with this last year’s wins. I’ve kept this level of performance ever since I started using this approach. Might be worth a try.

Today is World-wide Nutella Day. While you are out for lunch, stop and buy a jar  for each of your team members. Be sure to bring back spoons if you don’t have them at the office.
A fat scoop of Nutella on a spoon, and the few moments it takes to eat it are a heavenly break. You can trust me on this one.

Chocolate and Hazelnuts. Lower fat than peanut butter, and all chocolate. A jar can be kept at your desk forever (which at my place is about two weeks +/-) And did I mention it’s chocolate?

“Laura,

Are you familiar with 360 evaluations? We are wondering whether we should consider a service that will survey members of our firm to understand their priorities and impressions of our department.

Times are tight, and we may be perceived as “expendable overhead” and want to be sure we are doing what we should to avoid being seen as expendable.”

Humm. I may be too late.

When dealing with technical professionals, I find they have difficulty reading the marketplace and understanding how best to connect with their customers who are not so technically oriented. Not all, but many. That’s why they hire marketing professionals!

Therefore, soliciting suggestions from them about what the Marketing department should be doing is like asking a visually impaired individual (or my husband) to critique the dresses worn to the Oscars.

However, Marketing Professionals must prove their value to the firm or be labeled as expendable “Overhead.”

We must focus on “why” we do everything, and design measures to prove that what we are doing is having the intended effect.

Too often I hear marketing folks make the same mistake their Subject Matter Experts make: “Isn’t it obvious that I’m doing the right things?” No, it isn’t.

Design Metrics and Measure

For example, at one firm, I changed a sacred company tradition, Holiday Greeting Cards. The practice had been to address all the Holiday cards, and then put them in the conference room for folks to riffle through during business hours, taking out the ones for folks they knew, signing those cards, then putting them back in the envelope and filing for the next person to riffle, sign, file. This was time consuming and resulted in cards worn out from so much handling, with a variety of signatures (some legible, some not) inside.

I wanted to change this.

Instead, I spent more money buying custom-made pop-up holiday cards which we designed in spring and had manufactured, assembled and sent back by late October. Each year the design changed.

One year, the popup was an engineer’s drawing table with a plot, an articulated lamp reaching over the desktop, and engineering tools laid on the blueprint. The card from which the pop-up sprang was an office floor. We had slits cut in the “floor” to hold 2″x 3″ mini-blueprints of each of our major areas: Wastewater, Transportation, Land Planning and Surveys. The small blueprints were printed at 45%, so they were muted.

Then, we sent each person a stack of small blueprints of their specialty, with a list of clients. Each person signed their name to the stack of mini-blueprints and highlighted everyone on their list to whom they wanted to send greetings. If they wanted to write a personal note to a person, they put a post-it(tm) note on the piece, with that person’s name, and wrote on the front and back of the mini-blueprint.

We compiled the lists, and a staff person would sit with the stacks of signed mini-blueprints, stuffing each card with the mini-blueprints, held by the slots in the “office floor.”

I documented the results:

Cost: We saved quite a bit of money by not having senior staff use billable office hours to sign cards. Instead we spent our money on seriously cool cards, and had junior staff stuffing envelopes instead of senior engineers. (I timed one of our senior people the first year I witnessed this debacle, and then sat at their desk while they repeated the exercise with the following year x number of staff signing Holiday cards. This ain’t calculus.)

Goals: Good Will for our company, and a lasting positive impression.

Results: Much nicer cards which arrived in pristine condition, instead of mussed up ordinary cards. (I included an example of each in the first report) For a lower overall cost.

Proof:
1) Copies of Thank you notes, from clients, for our holiday greetings.
2) Our cards were pinned up instead of thrown out. One customer wrote to say that they still had our card from the previous year pinned up on their board when the new one arrived the following year.

Metrics and Measurement

I rant to my trainees that they need to spend as much thought on how to measure results as on how to get attention in the marketplace. Then, they need to regularly report these results. Otherwise, they ARE overhead, and expendable at any shift in the winds. Marketing folks who don’t know how to market internally don’t understand a critical part of making their work a career instead of a job.

I rant about tracking Hit Rate and this is why. You must translate your work and your progress into tangible results, and do it routinely. As a Marketing Director, I tracked value derived from each of our activities:

• what is the value of the publications we subscribe to?
• What specifically is the value of the organizations to which we belong?
• Why are we doing this?
• Does it make a difference, and if so what is that difference?

Back in the dark ages, all federal procurements were published in a newsprint mailing from the Federal Register. In my firm, they had over 200 subscriptions to this daily newspaper. However, by the time RFPs are  published in the Federal Register, the winners have already captured all the information they need to win, and started collecting materials for their proposal. It was folly to use this publication as a starting point to identify work opportunities.

I recommended canceling these expensive subscriptions. The decision was met with howls by the subscribers, but the VP who cancelled the subscriptions understood both the reasons why and especially appreciated the savings.

It sent engineers running to marketing meetings to figure out how to infiltrate agencies for whom they would like to and should work. Instead of spending time writing loser proposals, they were figuring out who to meet and what to ask so they could find emerging opportunities. And the hit rate started to rise.

IMHO, the best 360 evaluation is to examine everything you do and figure out whether it is making enough difference to offset the cost. If your day is filled with unquestioned tasks for which you have no measure of value, pick one, and start measuring!

I’ve been thinking about teaching Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) proposal writing skills lately.

The first assumption technical experts bring with them is that, what is obvious to them should be obvious to others. This isn’t correct, and loser proposals prove this. In many cases, your competitors are technically as qualified as your team. However, the winning proposal communicates value in a more illuminating way.

Chris Witt at Life after Powerpoint! said it best yesterday:

– Knowing something without acting on it is like having a candle without lighting it.
– Acting on what you know is like lighting the candle.
– Communicating what you know so others can use it is like using your lit candle to light other people’s candles.

That’s why “presentation and communication” skills are so highly rated, even for technical experts. The better able you are to share what you know so that other people can understand and use it, the more valuable you are.

This is a perfect analogy for proposal professionals. We tip the candles of our SMEs to light the candles of our clients.