The Responsibility Rotator!

Here is an idea I just came up with and I really think it could work!

Management sharing, or The Responsibility Rotator!

The basic premise behind this idea is to create a motivated, educated, empowered, and capable team. A team full of members that aren't afraid to take responsibility and who have developed great leadership skills.

I'm not talking big stuff here, (although it may work with high level management), I'm really talking about the smaller areas in a business that regularly need someone to take responsibility. I will try and explain my point in a scenarios, as that is how I like to do things :)

Everyone's a sales manager at Bob's paper company!

Bob runs a small company selling all different kinds of paper to businesses in his town. Bob has three full time sales staff (Chris, Jen, and Brad) and thinks he needs a sales manager, or at least a better way of managing the combined sales effort of his team. There are lots of opportunities for new business both with new customer development as well as increasing business with current customers; but he doesn't have time to do it.

Bob really needs a sales manager that can lead the sales team to greater sales. This will involve ensuring staff are visiting customers regularly, targeting business development activities for both new customers and increasing existing customer sales, and developing sales promotions.

In steps the Responsibility Rotator!!

The Responsibility Rotator gives each member of the sales team, Chris, Jen, and Brad, the opportunity to manage the sales team in rotating months. Now, being a good management theory, the Responsibility Rotator doesn't leave Chris, Jen, and Brad alone once he has been put in place; he gives them the support and education they need to do their new found jobs.

Each month the Responsibility Rotator puts a different person in charge of the sales team and lets them lead for a month; with the responsibility of leading a team, hitting the targets, and developing the ideas that will enable Bob's paper company to reach it's goal of increasing sales.

Bob's three sales staff have a fun time learning to be managed by each other in different months; but the end result is that they all learn what it takes to increase sales as well as lead a team. All three sales staff are motivated again by the job due to added responsibility, and love coming to work again. The ideas on how to increase sales flow think and fast from his staff trying to outdo each other each month. His staff also have a new found respect for their management and what it takes to lead a team.

Potential benefits of The Responsibility Rotator:

• staff feel empowered to do their jobs
• motivation levels stay high
• constant supply of new ideas
• competition to be the best
• highly educated staff
• lower management costs
• staff don't get stale, which easily happens with sales people
• leaders all through the team
• ease of mind that when you the owner is away or steps out of day to day management there are people in place capable of leading the business
• better communication within the team
• respect between team members and management
• many more!!

Please give me your feedback on this idea and let me know if you think it is hair brained or brilliance!!

P.S. This has probably been though up and written about before, but not to my knowledge... not that i've looked since coming up with the idea an hour ago.

What's the Zag in your Zig?

Check out this article all about finding your businesses true purpose and market position.

How to Be Different: 'Zag!'

Thanks to Marketing Prof's, Marty Neumeier, and Paul Williams for this! I'm doing it right now for my businesses to see what i'm really offering my customers and potential customers.

This is a great tool for getting your mind and focus back on track. One thing that many businesses do wrong is to try and focus on as large a demographic or market segment as possible. The owners think this expands their earning potential; but in reality it opens them up to as many competitors as possible; as well as often alienating their most valuable customers.

The key for a successful small business is your niche, your very own Zag in this world of Zigs.

Build better websites

I mentioned a few posts back that i would be going to the Zeald.com website seminar today. I went and it was extremely informative and very on the point. If you are in the web design business or need a website for your business then get along to a free seminar near you and learn about the most important aspects of a website.

Here are my notes from the seminar; hopefully David Kelly from Zeald doesn't mind! They aren't the most eloquent and are to the point rather than a complete narrative. If you want the full story please go to a seminar or you can get David's book The Secrets of Website Persuasion here.

Seminar Parts:

1. Two Key Success Factors
2. Measurement
3. Continued Improvement
4. Persuasion

Part One: Two Key Success Factors

1. Visitors
2. Persuasion (Conversion Rate)

This leads onto the two P's of Success

1. Promotion
2. Persuasion

Part Two: Measurement

• If you want to improve something you have to measure it first

Part Three: Continued Improvement

• TMT: Test, Measure, and Tune
• High Yield areas of your website should get the most focus for TMT
  

Part Four: Persuasion

1. Identify Objective and Develop a Powerful Strategy for Achieving that Objective

There are two main types of website objectives (there are other ones too but these are the main ones)

• Generate Sales
• Generate Enquiries or Leads

* Most people neglect the strategy level
* Brainstorm sessions on how to achieve the objective

2. Map Your Site and Identify the Conversion Pathway

• What pages does the visitor have to visit to do what you want them to do? Map it out in a graphical form.
• Macro and Micro conversion objectives: Macro = Overall Site Objective, Micro = Objective of a particular page.
• Create pages "recipies" for the key pages and then use the TMT philosophy to improve the pages to get the best version of the page that gives you the best results.

3. Establish Your Trust and Credibility

• No Matter what your product is or its price they won't buy it if your trust isn't established first!!
• Ways to increase your Trust and Credibility
• Website must load quickly
• Zeald.com has an online test to do this here
• One main factor in poor loading times is unoptimised images. Zeald has more info on this topic here.
• User friendly
• Adhere to industry layout standards
• If you want results then follow the standards!!
• Splash pages are bad
• Web pages must have a professional design
• Trust Building Elements
• Examples of persuasion
• testimonials
• code of conduct
• background checks
• industry relationships
• past customer list (hall of fame)
• guarantees
• industry and other awards
• privacy policy
• terms of trade
• returns policy
• The two most powerful pages for persuasion are About Us and Pre-Sales Pages
• About Us
• most important page for trust building
• check Zeald.com for their own examples
• visions and passions
• company mission statement
• code of conduct
• company history (Zeald's is 7 pages long, yes that is 7 pages, and what's more people actually read it!)
• every customer facing person at Zeald has a 3 page biography on the website
• Pre-Sales Pages
• free articles
• free tools
• give value to the customer while asking for nothing in return
• in-depth information on products and services
• TMT the trust aspect on EVERY page
• The more they know about you and your company the more they trust you.

4. Spark Interest and Develop Persuasive Momentum

• There is no point in doing this part unless Part 3 is already done!!
• Headlines
• There are two types of effective headlines
• Questions: e.g. Is your website generating amazing results?
• Statements: e.g. Generate amazing results online today!
• People want results, not the product. This is embodied it he famous quote: "People want 1/4 inch holes, not 1/4 inch drill bits."
• Every headline needs to focus on the result. TMT it.
• Words, Pictures, and Video
• Long vs Short text
• It is proven that long, informative text on website outsells short, to the point text every time.
• Different presentation for different people need to come into a one fits all approach for websites.
• Long copy needs to be broken into sections with clear section headings to enable people to read the parts that they are most interested in.
• Be comprehensive!!
• Pictures
• Use only one picture and use that picture to lead to a picture gallery
• Pictures need to be focused on the same end result as the text
• use imagery that reflects the ideal result of using the product or service

5. Complete the Persuasion Process

• Have a clear call to action!!
• A simple statement that leads the customer to perform the activity that your objective states.
• Make it easy for the customer to do what you want

And finally:

• Lots of little improvements = VERY SUCCESSFUL WEBSITE

When good enough isn't really good enough

Check out this Blog post on Value Adding, or creating a Wienies. Thanks Seth for posting this link on your Blog.

Lesson from Drucker

Peter Drucker was a world leader in management theory, ideas, and trends. Here are some lessons you could learn from Peter Drucker.

1. "Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality."
   
2. "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."
   
3. "The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said."
   
4. “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
   
5. "Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes."
   
6. "Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility."
   
7. “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say 'I'. And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say 'I'. They don't think 'I'. They think 'we'; they think 'team'. They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but 'we' gets the credit.... This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.”

Think about the above seven quotes every week and how it applies to you and your organisation. Remember, you lead your organisation or area of influence and that puts you in a position of responsibility.

Put the first quote on your wall and stare at it for 10 minutes while thinking about what Drucker is saying and how if effects every level of your organisation. Do you and your staff already recognise this fact? What can you do to bring this thinking and focus to your organisation?

Get to know your customer

I've been reminded recently about the importance of getting to know your customer and ensuring that you do regular customer research.

The question that always comes up when someone want to do customer research is: "How do I get customers to respond; and when they do respond to actually complete the whole survey?"

This is a difficult question to answer, but from my own experience and reading other people experiences there are only two real answers:

• Keep it short;
  
• Offer an incentive.

In the past I've offered a free trip to the Gold Coast, and this got us a very good response rate and an acceptable drop off rate for what was quite a long survey. I don't normally reccommend long surveys; but when I stepped into this company they had no idea of their customer base and we needed to get a lot of information relatively quickly so we could move forward with some education on our current audience. This only worked as we had a reasonably high value incentive to offer.

The easiest way to do surveys where you don't want to offer a major prize or incentive is to create short, simple surveys on a singular issue. Sometimes these short surveys can be the most powerful and informative as they get right to the point of only the one issue.

A great customer survey is the one recommended by Ben McConnell in his recent blog post entitled Remodeling Customer Surveys. Ben's customer feedback survey uses just four very powerful questions focusses around the customers experiences when dealing with your company. This survey will provide you with great feedback on customer satisfaction and experiences, give you and indication of how much word of mouth marketing your are acheiving, and what your company can do to improve.

My final word on customer surveys is this: Keep them simple, know what information you want to gather, and always follow through on the information you gather.

Excercise 4 Life

In a world where obesity is endemic i think that Amanda Imber has hit the nail on the head with her article entitled "Finding Inspiration on the Treadmill"

The gist of Amanda's article is that research has been done on the effect of excercise on our ability to be creative. The results are very conclusively in the "Excercise = More Creativity" corner and that a simple 5-10 minutes exercise before a brainstorming or creativity session will give results that non-exercised people could only dream about.

Thanks to Amanda and Get to the Po!nt for their great information!!

Zeald - Free Website Seminar

Are you based in New Zealand?

Do you have, or want to have a website?

Do you want that website to work and actually get you the rewards that the web can offer?

Some partners and I are going to a free seminar held by Zeald in Albany, Auckland on Weds the 21st May. This was one of the benefits of visiting the Small Business Expo a few weeks ago. The mini seminar (20mins) at the expo gave a brief introduction into what this half day seminar will teach us. The brief of the Seminar is:

Secrets of Website Persuasion
Discover How To Turn Your Website Into One of The Most Powerful Sales and Marketing Tools Employed Within Your Business! Learn How To Create a Powerful Website That Persuades Your Website Visitors To Take Action!

Get along if you are able, otherwise Zeald runs seminars thoughout New Zealand all though the year.

Recorded Message Voodoo

I just got a phone call from my mobile provider Vodafone New Zealand asking me to pay my overdue bill. Now, i pay my bill every month, i just pay it on the last possible day before i am cut off so I've come to expect this, but there is a twist. The phone call was a prerecorded message and was not tailored to me at all. There is nothing i hate more than getting a phone call and saying hello only to hear back "this is a pre recorded message from...." I hang up straight away each and every time, no matter what.

A tip... do not do this. It is bad marketing, let alone a very poor attempt at communication as the message NEVER get through.

As for Vodafone? Send me a simple SMS message with my overdue amount at an early phase, and keep sending them to me every second day until i pay up. Vodafone NZ used to do this and it worked well for me, the new way doesn't.

SMS reminders work extremely well as they aren't intrusive and they stay on the phone as a permanent reminder.