If you’re business is waiting for things to get better, then be afraid or get out now, because business as usual is DEAD

Some days you just can’t help hitting the roof and blowing off a bit of steam, whether it’s a bad day at work or problems at home, there’s always something that gets you worked up, but most of the time it doesn’t push you over the edge.  You grab a drink, watch a film, cuddle up to a loved one or chat with a friend and put the world to rights, finally waking up the following day with a clearer head.

Other periods in your life things are just plain difficult and nothing will get better until something changes and if you need change in your life then only you can make it happen, but you have to consider some very tough consequences.

The reason I wrote the Change Paper was because I’d been through some pretty tough experiences and while I was going through them nobody seemed to have any credible answers, apart from ring more people, see more people, stop being lazy blah! Blah! BLAH!

Things were a mess and got real nasty at times and I soon realised that the only way it was going to get better was if I changed something. But what ?

I was a knowledgeable guy and yet somehow the companies I ended up working for had me turned into a phone dialling robot and dare devil gate crasher of business parks and receptions. What the….!

Problems are good as they force you to look for answers if you are prepared to face the truth.

Where things were actually better, my career always came to a plateau and I realised that moving on up was going to require me kissing some real butt or becoming something I just wasn’t. Argghh….what the hell do I have to do to get around this ?

I had an itch to do bigger and better things and had to learn how to make things work differently as I just couldn’t find anybody with a credible strategy that I could actually use to build a business or better life.

This was a cross roads, I take the red pill and hunt for answers to my questions or the blue pill and simply carry on simply doing what I was doing before in the hope that things would eventually change for the better.

The upshot was that I learned that conventional thinking and a lack of alternative strategies kept me doing what I had always done, throwing up barrier after barrier, so I had to go searching for some answers.

Finally I came across a series of ideas, principles and strategies that started to change things for me in a way that I had always thought was possible, allowing me to use my knowledge and skills much more effectively and to get results that I could actually measure and define. It was an engineer’s dream come true, where reality starts to become a mathematical probability.

What I learned was that for those people in commodity markets where there is either a ton of “me too” suppliers already established, or that there is no real knowledge or skills that you can communicate effectively which can differentiate you and keep competitors out then you’ve got some tough times ahead even if the “going” may look rosy right now.

Change is inevitable and is never the real problem it’s the FEAR of change that is.

Everything changes, and if you can’t build a ring fence around yourself or your position in the market, then I would bet money that somebody’s going to come along and burn down your house, and all that money will just go somewhere else unless you’re very lucky, and we all know that luck alone is not a strategy, but we all need a little.

Most of us have been forced to do conventional selling and marketing because that is all everybody knows. Sometimes it works, but in a competitive, established, change resistant market it’s a route to nowhere.

I’ve always loved learning and especially loved being involved with leading (not bleeding) edge technology. In fact while I was at school I was so into my electronics and ahead of other students in my class that the science teacher had me taking a class on electronics.  Cool!

Later on I became a mentor to younger kids that had learning difficulties at school and turned around a lad who was struggling with his reading, not because he couldn’t read, but because he couldn’t relate to it or understand why he should bother.

Things happen for a reason if you embrace them and triggers fire bullets into new trajectories.

That was my first lesson in persuading resistant people and making a life changing connection. After the year was out his parents came up to me beaming that their son had come on in leaps and bounds and couldn’t believe how well he could now read. It was a great feeling to have been of such service and it’s something that I did instinctively without understanding how or why.

It was probably this event combined with some other significant triggers that got me involved in business, as well as my earlier apple selling days and the experiences of my family, many of whom had a variety of life experiences and ventures into working for themselves.

There are a ton of stories to tell here, which include losing the family home, having the banks force the closure of a family business, selling up to gangsters that literally threatened us out, almost going bankrupt and a whole lot more. When your down, life seems to just keep on kicking.

Anyhow, I got my degree (in electronics if you didn’t guess) and then pursued a career in sales and marketing but didn’t realise just how much of what we were doing was focused on the products we represented or sales techniques, battling with objections, pushing for orders, fancy marketing and just plain bad management.

There was just not enough focus on the problems faced by the customer or working to better understand how we could deliver more service or value to that customer. Something I now know a lot about, especially with some of the other businesses I’ve built.

At times it seems that everybody just wants a slice of the pie, but few are actually willing to really understand what they needed to do to claim it, apart from fighting each other for it and talking big.

Surely we’ve left our caveman days behind us by now and there are better and smarter ways of doing things ?

Squabbling over the same piece of pie is both energy sapping and time consuming and in the long run nobody wins.

Yeah, if you were to look into the past you’d find plenty of groups and economies that became rich (I purposely didn’t use wealthy) because they took riches from elsewhere using force. But over time they always lose in the long run. It’s not a strategy for building a better future world and we should be learning from these mistakes not repeating them. Sigh…

The best companies I’ve studied and dealt with always deliver value, and a lot of it. Just take a look at the supermarket John Lewis in the UK that not only delivers value to its customers but also understands how to distribute value to its staff and treat its suppliers as fairly as possible.

So yes, something does have to change and these outdated attitudes are no way to build a future for our selves or our businesses. Do you remember what the number one question is that any customer is always asking themselves ? Yes, it’s “why should I buy from you” ? And plain simply few companies actually do a great job of answering that simple but powerful question.

My experiences are certainly not isolated from the feedback I’ve received and in fact just the other day I got off the phone from a colleague who is still in one of the technology industries I left as an employee.

He’s a good guy and his story confirmed my beliefs and got me mad, but….

When you’ve got the pain of a bad experience it gets multiplied when others suffer.

Apart from agreeing with most of my beliefs he confirmed to me that the marketing does absolutely nothing for the sales team in terms of leads and so the sales people are once again forced to spend all of their time generating leads and trying to close sales with little support in the way of resources or good motivation and management skills.

Oh, there is a team of product managers that do have a marketing type function however all they seem to do each day is spend their time forwarding on product releases to the sales team when they would be better off trying to understand how their products could be applied to different customers and identifying markets for development with the sale team. Even better they could actually be helping to generate some leads.

Instead the sales team is being stretched to the Max and management is leaning down heavily on them to deliver everything. They lead with fear believing that their sales force is not motivated.

If they sales team really was unmotivated it’s simply because they get poorly treated by management, when what they really need is leadership.

In fact it’s getting to the point where they are struggling for numbers in other parts of the business so they’re adding extra pressure onto my friend and his team to deliver more with even less. And just wait until you find out just how much less. It’s shocking, and its why I eventually quit my JOB.

Those management dummies that cannot change are the ones that need their butts kicking.

Every hour of every day management are calling for updates and status reports on deals which is just ridiculous because they believe that their sales people are slacking or are just plain lazy when really its because management has no idea what’s really going on.

There’s no plan, just fear for their positions and jobs and instead of getting the basics right first they’ve got their sales people focusing on deals they have little to no chance winning. It’s crazy, as they are now competing against the very same manufacturers who’s equipment they are reselling and who are targeting the same big accounts. Its total lunacy because these manufacturers can sell this equipment cheaper and have the engineering resources to win deals (design ins).

All management can see are the big accounts and big numbers, but they are totally blind to the truth.

During the industrial revolution and for the most part up until the last 20 years businesses in many sectors and especially the technology sectors have lead with product first, but markets have changed and they become saturated with choice so hammering sales people does not get results.

You have to change your strategy, sooner rather than later.

So what are these bright sparks doing to motivate their sales staff during these tough times (this is happening during the 2008-2010 recession). Yes, they’ve reduced their basic salary AND taken away any bonuses and now they are wanting them to deliver more. Hello, is anybody home…?

I do see that bonuses and commission are a motivator as well as destructive as there are sales people that will do anything to get a sale even if their product or services is a pile of crap, so as long as what you are doing is adding value and helping customers then commission and bonuses are a good thing, but if you’re just fighting over the sample slice of pie, or don’t care what happens to your customer then its going to get nasty.

Listen up, the word is out and change is coming, either get on the train or get run over by it.

The sad fact is that my friend knows his customers and their problems AND what they really need. In fact he’s put forward a lot of sensible ideas, but guess what, they’re just being ignored and the same old bull crap keeps getting re-spun in the drier.

He’s a good guy and has some great ideas about how to improve things but nobody’s listening and his enthusiasm is slowly dwindling and because he can’t afford to rock the boat too much as he’s got to be careful about pushing things to hard because of life’s priorities, so things are just not changing,

So the upshot is that this idiotic company has lost the input of a good team member and I’m sure when the opportunity comes he will be jumping ship, sailing to islands greener and plentiful.

The people closest to your customers, often have some fabulous ideas. It’s a shame they are all too often overlooked and that people refuse to embrace any necessary changes soon enough.

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