Love him or hate him, Trump has freed up a bit of capital. How would you like your private equity spent? Find a great idea. Find a great team. How do you help your great team deliver that great idea? Get them some space, desks, chairs, computers, lights and heat. Then what? If you provide the funding, you have every right to solid processes that are understood by you and your team. Documented processes provide everyone with the playbook on everything from how concepts are moved to market to the controls in place for cutting checks. The difference process makes Great businesses start with great ideas and great intentions. A … Read More
Enabling Growth Through Business Architecture: Digitize
This post is the fourth and final in a series on enabling growth through business architecture. In the first article we covered how and why to understand your business capabilities. In the second article, I shared about the importance of establishing metrics and controls to understand and manage work. The third post was all about inexpensive and practical ways to train people involved in doing the brute force work necessary to scale, but has yet to be automated. This article caps the series off with digitization of workflows. Digitization is the automation of existing manual or paper based processes, by digitizing the information. Even the most technology oriented companies face … Read More
Enabling Growth Through Business Architecture: Training
This post is the third in a series on dealing with growth through business architecture. In the first article we covered how and why to understand your business capabilities. In the second article, I shared about the importance of establishing metrics and controls. In this post we will make a pivot to discuss how you keep supporting growth while your organization works to digitize and automate for limitless scalability. By now you have an understanding of the capabilities, major functions, and the supporting processes. Beyond that, you now also have metrics to track historical performance and projection information that indicates where the scaling issues will be most severe. These scalability … Read More
Enabling Growth Through Business Architecture: Establish Metrics & Controls
This is the second post in a series about enabling growth through business architecture and we will cover the importance of establishing metrics and controls. In the first article, we covered the understanding capabilities, so follow that link if you want to start from the beginning. The management adage “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” is critical to organizations that are at the cusp of hyper growth, and setting metrics and controls early keeps you grounded when making business decisions. Now that you have a good understanding of capabilities, functions and processes along with the performance characteristics, you have been able to establish the hot spots within the organization. … Read More
Enabling Growth Through Business Architecture: Understand Capabilities
When a company has been successful and begins to scale, it is an exciting time and a validation of the product and the team. Investors are interested, customers are interested, and maybe even the media wants to learn what the secret to success has been. Congratulations, but it is time to think about the growing pains that will inevitably crop up. You will begin to hire new people at a rate like never before. How will you train all those people? Teams will buy new systems to support their goals, and data will be in silos. Those new sales people will be doing non-standard deals that you may regret later. … Read More
3 Ways to Sell Implementation as a Competitive Differentiator
Hopefully, your company’s sales cycle includes some amount of customer education about the implementation process so the customer knows how to get started on the right foot. Frequently we hear that Salespeople are hesitant to talk about implementation because they don’t want to “risk the deal” by addressing work the customer will have to do. Customers are not stupid, they know that implementation will have to happen, and they expect that the vendor is going to lead and guide them through to a successful conclusion. Glossing over implementation or skipping it all together during the sales process can leave the customer feeling like they were tricked. Even worse, it sets … Read More
The Strategic Importance of Implementation
Sales provide the essential financial fuel to keep the business going, but after the sale is when the important and often difficult, work of implementation begins. In future posts we will cover some of the mechanics of how to get implementation right, but this post we will start with the strategic importance of why getting implementation right matters. 1. Your customers need implementation to work. The customer has made a strategic decision that the benefits of your product outweigh the benefits of the current situation plus the pain of change. They know not all of their employees will welcome the change and may have even staked their career on this … Read More
Maintaining team morale in the midst of uncertainty and change
Question: What is your most effective approach in maintaining team morale in the midst of uncertainty and change? I recently answered this question and with so many organizations undergoing change and working to more effectively manage the impacts of uncertainty on their workers, I wanted to share my response. Answer It depends on what type of uncertainty or change the team is going through, but are few that never fail: Honesty. People don’t expect you to know all of the answers, but they do expect you to be honest with them. Confidentiality must be observed but don’t hide information, especially information that will impact people’s livelihood. Empathy. Think about how the … Read More
Are your NPS results good or bad? Find out now.
Conducting Net Promoter® Score (NPS) surveys is an excellent way to find out what customers think about your company. If you have been doing surveys for a while you know interpreting the data can be tricky. An improving trend is always good but understanding how you compare to your competitors is much more important. Is a 42 good? Yep, if the competition is at 20 you are an industry star. If the competition is at 80, well…there is work to do. SurveyMonkey has made knowing how you stand a lot easier. This SurveyMonkey blog post, explains the new capability. To participate in the benchmarks it requires the use of a survey template, … Read More
1 simple way B2B software companies can increase professional services revenue
As a software company with a professional services team there will inevitably be times your team is swamped with work, and there will be times when people are roaming the halls trying to find ways to stay (or at least look) busy. The irony is that you likely have plenty of customers to generate enough work to keep the entire team busy every day, but there is not enough awareness. Marketing of professional services rarely ever happens in B2B software companies because the marketing effort is all directed toward selling software…which is right where it should be. One simple way to solve this is to create a calendar of professional … Read More