What the CEO Wants you to Know
Friday, March 5, 2010
I first heard about Ram in Fortune magazine in an article titled The strange existence of Ram Charan, where his travel regime was dissected: he travels non-stop and regardless of his location, his assistants in Dallas send him new clothes via courier and he returns his dirty laundry to them.
What the CEO wants you to know was the first of his books that I purchased.
This book is from a similar approach to Winning and The Art of Profitability
in terms of it's ease of reading and practical views on business.
In it, Ram takes the principles of 'street smarts' and relates those basics to how a good CEO looks at, and runs, their business. Those principles include margin, velocity and ROE but in a far more engaging way than any business textbook you could pickup. Moreover, it does remind the reader that everyone in a business, whether it is the CEO or the receptionist, is responsible for the organisations profitability.
I managed to bump into Ram in the Qantas lounge in LA whilst returning from Chicago in November of last year - he's quite a nice guy and judging from the people chatting with him, quite populate with Australian executives.
Labels: Books, Personal effectiveness, Sales and Marketing
posted by Lee Gale @ 1:29 AM,
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Predictable Irrationality If You Build What They Ask For, They Will Not Come
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Traditional approaches to defining and deploying enterprise software fail to account for that fact that people are influenced by their environment, emotions, shortsightedness, and other forms of irrationality. How do we get past the predictable irrationality of people to redefine the problem and create experiences that people will embrace?
Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
Labels: Open Text, Personal effectiveness, Sales and Marketing
posted by Lee Gale @ 3:02 PM,
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Life's a Pitch
Monday, November 30, 2009
I originally bought this book knowing of my leaving Adobe so thought it would be useful to get my brain into the right head-space for my next role. My partner also constantly accuses me of being too 'nice' at work and not trumpeting my successes nearly as much as I should.
So it was with those points in mind that I picked this book up at the airport on my way over to the United States in December, but as usual, didn't get through nearly half the reading material I took with me.
Fast forward to late February 2009, with several job options available to me, I finally opened this book (and ignore that it took until November for me to blog about it).
The book is organised into halves with each of the authors providing a different approach. Roger Mavity writes the first half and Stephen Bayley the second. Roger's style is more end-result oriented that is concise, organised and business-like, where as Stephen's style is a journey that is more philosophical and colourful. I gravitated more to the first half initially, but after a few chapters the second half grew on me.
This really is a 'must read'. For everyone. At first glance, you'd believe it was only for sales people but about 80 pages in you realise that "the whole of Life's a Pitch".
The first half of the book opens with a brilliant explanation of why 'pitching' matters:
"Life is not a pattern of gradually evolving improvement. It's a series of long, fallow patches punctuated by moments of crucial change. How you handle the long fallow stretches doesn't matter much. How you handle the moments of change is vitalYou can either choose to believe that or not... I do - as I made the point in my blog Optimism & Staying focused where I called out Po Bronson's point of similar effect as well as the underlying them to Outliers.
These big moments are not decided by chance - they're decided by how you handle them. How you pitch your case is what makes the difference."
We're then guided through chapters such as:
- It's theatre, not information - recognising the emotional aspects as opposed to the logical aspects of a decision;
- Think 'playwright' not 'actor' - understanding that a great performance starts with a great script. Annoyingly, this book made me realise that many of the presentation courses I've done over the years could have either been re-engineered to teach me the lesson faster rather than have me learn it by blind luck. That lesson, on page 21 of this book - "if the content isn't strong no amount of polished delivery will save it". Very few presentation skills courses focus on the content, rather, they talk about structure, content and preparation as tools, but generally focus on how you present. Over the years, I've learned how well I present reflects exactly how knowledgeable and passionate I am about the topic. Doh!;
- A good pitch starts in your diary - stepping us through the activities involved in preparing the pitch and ensuring you make the time to do them (in fact, this chapter bears strong resemblance to the Tim Ferris' remarks about aggressive time management in The 4-Hour Workweek as well as those in my blog Are You Spending Your Time the Right Way?);
- Get your mind and your body to the right space - putting the case forward that to inspire unusual thinking, one needs to remove themselves to a new space to think in. I agree as both my desk and home make poor places for me to come up with my best ideas;
- Shaping your pitch & Understanding structure;
- Tell your story from problem to solution - putting forth the case for the story to be about problem and solution rather than data. Here we're given great tid-bits to keep in mind including the point that when we're sick, there is nothing more reassuring than the ability of the doctor to explain our problem in detail. The linkage here is that the audience believes "He may not have solved our problem yet, but he really knows what our problem is" which in turn leads to the feeling "If he understands the problem well, I trust him on the answer". The other über critical point introduced in this chapter is that the solution doesn't have to be perfect - i.e. there is no silver bullet;
- Make simplicity an obsession - experience shows an audience would rather back the man than the solution, ergo, it is the pitcher who is on trial not the presentation. There are some great points in this section about 'winners' that reflect a lot of what Jack Welch talks about in Winning, including the point that "Winners instinctively know that to make something big happen, you've got to concentrate on the few things that really matter. That is why they keep it simple";
- Have you got the perfect answer?;
- The cornerstone slide - making the point regarding the need to identify the one slide the encapsulates your central idea;
- The two-edged sword called the 'executive summary' - a chapter that really helps address the challenge of demonstrating comprehensiveness as well as clarity i.e. one central idea vs the wide range of related issues. It also makes the point that the summary needs to come at the end of the pitch so as not to lose your audience before they are fully on board with your story;
- Confidence is the key - taking us through the issue that where money is involved (and it usually is in a pitch) the pitch gets more emotional - primarily because people who have money tend to want to keep it and the more they have, the more passionately they want to keep it. There is some gems of advice about not 'needing the deal too much' that I'll go into in another blog;
- The tyranny of PowerPoint - a topic I've blogged about in Nine steps to PowerPoint magic (and Seth's Best of 2008) and where Roger covers well, pointing out that you need to be the master and make PowerPoint the servant (a small aside: I understand Roger's point on the use of logo's and corporate style sheets, but would suggest the reason people put their logo's on every page is that PowerPoint are often printed/emailed as 'leave behind' documents and therefore the logo is a way to ensure others are less likely to rip-off your intellectual property);
- The art of rehearsal - which I took out some good pointers on rehearsing content & concepts with your peers but then rehearsing delivery by yourself;
- The pitch itself - this chapter has some great tips on body language, pace, dealing with questions, the use of speaker notes, the use of humour and how to close the meeting;
- The different types of pitch - here, we are opened up to the subtly different nature of pitches with a great illustration of multiple job interviews for a single role - some are about getting a 'yes' and others are about avoiding a 'no'. This chapter proves even more valuable in that it deals with 'internal presentations' such as pitching for annual budgets where 'pre-selling' is vital in order to avoid dealing with a 'no' that you have to live with afterwards. The value of this chapter builds further with the advice on dealing with people who live in Spreadsheet Land (i.e. bankers, accountants, etc);
- The art of collaboration; and
- The loneliness of power - a really fascinating chapter on the pressures CEOs face and how to pitch to them as equals, as well as why they look to outside consultants for advice... which sadly then takes a strange detour in chapter 20 titled 'Numbers, nervousness and nonsense; or, the role of management consultants in civilised society'. It seemed a little bit of a beat-up.
Finally, Roger finishes up with the psychology of pitching - understanding the transfer of power. Again, to quote "It's about the removal of negatives and the creation of positives". It relates a little to the book All Marketers are Liars in terms of understanding the dynamics of what you are attempting to do. It's this chapter and the following six that segway so nicely from the 'how' into Stephen's... I guess you'd call it the 'why bother?'.
Read it and you will be better for it. Chop chop!
Labels: Books, Personal effectiveness, Sales and Marketing, Sociology
posted by Lee Gale @ 1:54 AM,
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Understanding business development
Monday, October 12, 2009
As usual, Seth Godin makes some good points in his blog Understanding business development.
Definitely worth reading if your are in a business development role (and we're all in business development these days) or alliance role.
I think Seth's points echo and expand on the comments I made in Making business alliances work - I particularly like point #3:
Courtship, negotiation and marriage. Every deal has three parts, and keeping them straight is essential. During the courtship phase, you win when you are respectful, diligent, enthusiastic, engaging, outgoing, and relentless in your search to make a connection. Do your homework, research people's backgrounds, learn about their kids, visit them--don't make them visit you. Look people in the eye, ask hard but engaging questions, you know the drill. Basically, treat people as you'd like to be treated, because the people you most want to work with have a choice, and they may just not pick you. Hint: if you skip the courtship part, the other two stages probably won't come up.
Labels: Sales and Marketing
posted by Lee Gale @ 1:11 AM,
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Platforms vs Eyeballs aka Assets vs Expenses
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
I was reading closely related blogs of Seth Godin the other day.
The first was The platform vs. the eyeballs where he looks at the shift in marketing to building a platform which which to collaboration & communicate with your community vs targeting eyeballs with your message.
As usual, Seth has some great points there everyone in sales & marketing should think about.
The second was Do marketers have assets? which when read after the blog above, really should jolt you into thinking about where you are investing in your business to build assets, vs just building expenses.
Labels: Sales and Marketing
posted by Lee Gale @ 1:14 AM,
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Making business alliances work
Saturday, September 26, 2009
I promised back in a May blog to write about "the pitfalls of alliances".
First of all, there is always a lot of debate over terminology in this area, but to be clear I think these factors apply to both joint ventures, business alliances and strategic alliances.
I thought a cool definition of an alliance was by Rosabeth Moss Kanter in an HBR article: Alliances are the corporate equivalent of "friends with benefits." The partners combine forces to achieve strategic goals of their own without getting married, being engaged, or dating exclusively.
Secondly, I'm pretty sure there are entire semesters devoted to this and related topics at business schools around the world, so this blog is by no means exhaustive - just my two cents on the topic. :-)
My personal views as to why alliances fail are as follows:
- The business model wasn't clear;
- There wasn't a shared plan & measurement;
- There wasn't a clear enough value proposition for customers;
- Senior Management didn't make a commitment to making the partnership work; and
- The people factor.
A good article on the "why are we doing this and what is the best structure for us to achieve our objective" is the Booz Allen Hamilton article here. In The Art of Profitability the issue of business model design is simplified into easy to understand models. And of course, there are tonnes of assets online including at McKinsey's wesbite and HBR.
With any business endeavour - if you want to get from A, to B, to C - you've got to have a plan. And for a plan to work, you've got to ensure everyone with something at stake is involved.
Sounds obvious, right?
What's amazing is how hard it is to get 'busy people' to commit to joint planning to put on paper "here's what I want, here's what you want, and here's how we're going to win together".
Planning by itself, however, isn't going far enough. As an Open Texter said in his blog "if you don't keep score then you are only practicing" - a statement Lou Gerstner echoed with "people respect what you inspect".
There are some really good tools out there to make both the planning & measurement easy. Checkout Salesforce.com and Channel Dynamics for ideas.
To point #2 - a good example of 1+ 1 = 3 is how Open Text has selected it's strategic partners, Microsoft and SAP. In both cases, the partner is a leader in a segment (Knowledge Worker vs Enterprise Processes), lacks the value that Open Text provides (Enterprise Content Management) and customers are clear on why they need the combined solution.
With any endeavour, if senior management isn't committed to the deal, no one is going to get behind the partnership. Jack Welch makes this point in Winning where he advises managers have to become cheerleaders for the new project.
Finally, the people factor. Like all relationships, you've got to work at it. Advice given to me a long time ago by a great boss & mentor was that "people deal with people". I think all too often people come to the party with their point of view and their agenda forgetting that the other party could be doing that as well.
Labels: Open Text, Sales and Marketing, SAP, Sociology
posted by Lee Gale @ 1:04 AM,
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BATNA
Monday, September 21, 2009
A handy concept to understand in sales is yours and the other parties BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement).
BATNA is the course of action that will be taken by a party if the current negotiations fail and an agreement cannot be reached - a party should generally not accept a worse resolution than its BATNA.
I'm always amused when I enter a negotiation with someone who hasn't looked at the situation from a position other than theirs. Equally amusing is someone who hasn't fully explored their options to understand which ones are actually available and/or suitable.
BATNA is the key focus and the driving force behind a successful negotiator and it has interesting parallels with the battle strategy of Helmuth von Moltke.
Moltke's main thesis was that military strategy had to be understood as a system of options since only the beginning of a military operation was plannable.
As a result, he considered the main task of military leaders to plan for all possible outcomes. His thesis can be summed up by two statements, one famous one that I often repeat: No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
Worth noting with any negotiation, people's positions and what they value will change over time (timing is everything).
The important thing is to ask for what you want - don't make people guess!
Labels: Personal effectiveness, Sales and Marketing
posted by Lee Gale @ 1:29 AM,
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SAP Value Engineering
Saturday, August 15, 2009
As part of my recent travels to Ontario, I spent three days with the Open Text APJ SAP team and some smart guys (Bill & Kris) at Open Text's head-office learning the in's and out's of SAP's Value Engineering process, specifically how it pertains to Open Text's solutions for SAP.
SAP Value Engineering is the process of looking at the value lifecycle for a company's IT investments from discovery to optimization:
- Value Discovery: How do you align your business and IT strategy?
- Value Realization: How can the business value be captured?
- Value Optimization: How can you maximize the value from your investment?
During the training, our focus was on the Value Discovery process - essentially building the business case.
Now, for the cynics out there, you'll be chuckling away wondering: what sane customer would put any value on an IT vendor's business case?
Having gone through this process and having spent years working in the SAP ecosystem, I can tell you the key reason customers value this process is not solely for the initial business case itself - although that is quite value.
What is truly valuable is gaining a thorough understanding of what you need to deliver in order to generate value from an investment. This insight is equally useful for both parties and helps create a partnership on the road to actually realising that value.
The alternative process is that an organisation sets their budget for a project, engages vendors, picks the lowest price offer and delivers a project that could be on-time and on-budget... but totally misses the opportunity to deliver spectacular business transformation and returns because the parties involved don't really understand where the opportunity was.
Labels: Open Text, Sales and Marketing, SAP
posted by Lee Gale @ 1:12 AM,
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Boost Your Sales Productivity, Effectiveness and Collaboration
Saturday, May 30, 2009
For those of you in sales, I'd recommend investing 10-30 minutes of your time checking out this webinar content presented by Jigsaw and Salesforce.com.
There are some great reminders, including:
- The importance of accurate CRM data (slide 4); and
- Obstacles to revenue growth (slide 16).
Labels: Sales and Marketing
posted by Lee Gale @ 2:10 AM,
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SAP accounces recipients of the Pinnacle Awards 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
On May 12th, SAP announced the recipients of the Pinnacle Awards 2009 for partner excellence.
I'm proud that the efforts of the Adobe Asia Pacific team in 2008, were recognised in Adobe winning "Regional Software Solutions Partner of the Year - APJ".
Whilst I'm no longer with Adobe, having left on Jan 31st 2009, I had the opportunity to lead the SAP sales business for Adobe in Asia Pacific during that period and I can tell you that the teams at SAP and Adobe in each office locally, regionally and globally pulled together to execute seamlessly.
A few shout-outs I'd like to make for those that deserve thanks for that award:
- Drew Wentzel, my partner, for supporting my workaholism and travel;
- Paul Muller for all my foundation skills in sales;
- Julian Quinn for giving me the opportunity to run that business;
- Nick Hodge and Craig Tegel for having originally bought me into the Adobe-world;
- Todd Rowe and Sue Habernigg for having helped mature my ISV sales experiences;
- Derek Judge, James Ning and Stuart Bell for helping me successfully engage with the SAP-world;
- Sumanth Gopal and Mark Szulc for being technical guru's and keeping me out of trouble with customers;
- Inder Narang, Andre Salazar, Matthias Zeller, Eric Lerner, Tom Person, Matt Rodgers, Robin Hewitt and JT Wheeler for all the support for someone outside their region (the US);
- Mark Phibbs and Mark Cokes for the trust and support in marketing;
- Jon Sheiman, Cameron Sherrard, Matt Norsa and Raymond Ngan for being superstar sales executives; and...
- ... the academy for this award. Just kidding! :-)
Getting two software companies to work together successfully isn't as easy as it would seem on paper. In fact, any alliance will be fraught with challenges from both within and externally. I'll take a crack at the topic of "the pitfalls of alliances" in my next blog.
Having now joined Open Text on May 1 2009, I'm looking forward to the challenge of winning that award again next year. :-)
Labels: Adobe, Open Text, Sales and Marketing, SAP
posted by Lee Gale @ 3:06 AM,
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Nine steps to PowerPoint magic (and Seth's Best of 2008)
Monday, January 26, 2009
When I blogged about All Marketers are Liars, I had indicated I was a fan of Seth's opinions, not just that book. I follow Seth's blog regularly and thought his "best of 2008" worth sharing.
Of particular note is the blog on Really Bad PowerPoint and it's close relative, Nine Steps to PowerPoint magic.
I think Seth takes a point and sharpens it to such a fine point in order to absolutely guarantee it breaks through. Therefore perhaps a few of these suggestions can be casually applied. :-)
Having said that, how many presentations have you sat through as a conference/meeting attendee that just plain sucked? As Seth says: "Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are)."
Perhaps a tactic I'll employ in 2009 is to send people these articles as part of my MS Outlook meeting acceptance email. :-)
For the next big presentation you are asked/invited to do, try the points Seth outlines:
- Use cue-cards. I cheat and use the presenter notes in PowerPoint;
- Make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. I love using pictures instead of words/bullet points; and
- Create a written document to leave-behind. I really need to do this more as I just can't help myself in trying to pack in as much data as possible (I'm a detail person!!);
Kudos to
Labels: Personal effectiveness, Sales and Marketing
posted by Lee Gale @ 3:57 AM,
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You Suck at Photoshop
Friday, January 23, 2009
I was introduced to this video series whilst attending Adobe's 2009 sales conference in San Jose.
What a riot!!! This guy's sense of humour is great, if not a little dark. My favourite is episode #4: "strap on your stupid and get at it"... "you've only been using about $75 worth of Photoshop and this is going to open you up to, like, at least $250 worth". :-)
Aside from the hilarity of the clips, there is quite a lot you can learn from this professionally. The first point is the authentic style of the presenter - uber critical in gaining the audience's respect. Another key lesson is the role YouTube can play in how an organisation can support it's customer base with fun and interesting tutorials on products. And finally, this series reiterates that learning doesn't need to be boring!
Labels: Adobe, Cool Tech stuff, Funny, Sales and Marketing
posted by Lee Gale @ 5:38 AM,
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Marketing lessons from the US election
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Following on from my blog on State of Denial and the recent inauguration of President Obama, I think it's worth taking a look at Seth Godin's Marketing lessons from the US election.
In doing some additional research to provide counterpoint for this blog, I Googled "analysis us election 2008" and found 3m+ articles.
Shortly before just closing the browser in an uncharacteristic moment of laziness, :-), my eye fell on the URL http://english.aljazeera.net. This took me to their analysis of battleground states for the election. This goes to show just how programmed by mainstream media I have (had?) become. I see "aljazeera" and think "terrorist news network". After a quick read, their analysis reads just like CNN's or BBC's. In fact, it has more facts and less sound bites. I've subsequently left the site with a reprogrammed view of Aljazeera as an "Arab and Muslim world news network".
But let me leave you on a humorous note... Jon's highlights from the Bush years:
Labels: Funny, Politics - World, Sales and Marketing
posted by Lee Gale @ 2:54 AM,
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Timing is everything
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Continuing from my blog about the book The 4-Hour Workweek, I'm known to be in the habit of saying: Timing is everything.
I picked up this view with respects to sales, but it applies to so much of what we do.
Tim outlines in his book, "when you ask for something often has a bigger impact than what you ask for".
Think about how this applies to:
- Humour. The difference between a good joke and a bad one is often a person's sense of timing;
- Buying & selling something. The July 10th 2008 Economist article titled Breaking up is hard to do looks at the impact of timing with regards to asset sales;
- Surfing. Get the timing right and you get to ride that wave;
- Growing a plant. Plant it too early in a season and the plants growth can be stunted from exposure to low temperatures; and
- Asking for help. As CNN outlined in November 2008, the US Congress wasn't particularly thrilled that the CEOs of the Big 3 auto companies asked for money, fresh off their private jets.
Searching high and low for the right terminology here was challenging. I went past sapience, consciousness, self-awareness, conscientiousness and settled at empathic. Being empathic means being able put yourself in the other person's shoes (not literally please), but don't confuse being empathic with sympathetic (the former is awareness where the later involves having a positive reaction).
Of course, the counterpoint to "timing is everything" is that "the timing is never right".
I hope you enjoy mulling over the yin and yang of timing. Next time you need to ask for something from someone, take some time to think how timing plays a role in getting the result you want.
Labels: Personal effectiveness, Sales and Marketing, Sociology
posted by Lee Gale @ 12:59 AM,
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All Marketers Are Liars
Monday, December 1, 2008
I was first introduced to Seth Godin's views and style on his regular "Change Agent" posting on Fast Company. The article that hooked me was his amusing views on business schools.
So, on a rare occasion when we were dashing through the airport on our way to a holiday (not work), I quickly grabbed his book All Marketers Are Liars from the shelf.
Seth offers his views on how marketers can discover and tell authentic stories that are believed by those who tell them and listen to them.
It appealed to me as pretty much the whole book is relevant in my work in software sales.
Note, there are extensive references to:
I'd recommend checking these out first in order to get more value out of "All Marketers Are Liars".
Essentially, the key take-away I saw in All Markets Are Liars, was the concept of appealing to people's worldviews and developing marketing (messaging) around that, rather than trying to buck the system.
As Seth proposes, people’s worldviews are different and we don’t all want the same thing. People can see the same data and make a totally different decision - so don’t try and change someone’s worldview. Seth contents that marketing succeeds when enough people with similar worldviews come together in a way that allows marketers to reach them cost-effectively, and therefore your opportunity lies in finding a neglected worldview, framing your story in a way that this audience will focus on and going from there.
But one caveat: a worldview is not forever - it’s what the consumer believes right now.
Labels: Books, Sales and Marketing, Sociology
posted by Lee Gale @ 3:09 AM,
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