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To Create Radical Outcomes – Make Sure Every Output Has A Purpose

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StrategyDriven Management and Leadership Article | Business Outcomes | To Create Radical Outcomes - Make Sure Every Output Has A PurposeIn many work situations, random things are created because people are not focused on a specific outcome. They do things, launch programs, take actions, but they have no business outcome in mind.

The problem usually occurs, because people don’t understand the difference between an outcome and an output. There is a BIG difference between the two. In our work with clients, we have found that these two ideas are often misunderstood. The “stuff” people create does not, in itself, constitute an outcome for the business. Every email, meeting, presentation, or experience that they create is just one thing by itself. It’s an output. But if they know what outcome they are trying to achieve, then all of the outputs become vehicles to drive the desired outcome.

Outcomes keep everyone focused on what’s most important for an organization and provide a way to measure whether they’ve achieved a desired result. Put another way: if you can’t connect your work and your outputs to a measurable result and outcome, then you shouldn’t be doing it at all.

Maintaining an Outcome-Based Mindset

An outcome-based mindset leads people to focus on results first, and outputs or actions second. When they identify the desired business result(s) first, they can then identify the tasks necessary to achieve them. For example, a salesperson for a large technology business, who is accustomed to orchestrating deals with a Chief Information Officer (CIO), would head into the first call thinking about how to have a conversation about the CIO’s role, challenges, and pressures she is facing, so that she finds value in the conversation and agrees to another meeting to explore how his company can help her. To be prepared for that outcome which will then lead to the larger outcome of making a sale, the salesperson has to be conversant in the CIO’s business. He’ll have to do some planning to learn about what other opportunities or contracts are already in play between the two entities. He’ll need to research where some of her challenges might be coming from, by reading annual reports. Some of those steps may lead to outputs — a discussion document or a whiteboard, for example.

But the outcome — agree to another meeting, to move a potential opportunity forward, to reach a shared vision of how his solutions can address her problems, is always what that salesperson has in mind. Focus on the wrong thing—such as selling her something she doesn’t need or spending too much time talking about his company or products—and she’ll become annoyed and feel like her time is being wasted. The outcome then becomes unreachable. When people are outcome-based, they always have the bigger picture in mind. Always. They make decisions about outputs and tasks based on whether or not they move them forward toward the outcome.

Maintaining a Group Output Mindset

Thinking in an outcome-based way can be an individual mindset, but it also can be a group mindset. It can even be an organizational or functional mindset. We believe strongly that having an outcome-based mindset is what makes all the difference in the work we do with our clients. The specific, measurable outcome becomes the north star that always helps us navigate.

Winning with Radical Outcomes

It’s arguable that there are many types of outcomes in business. The salesperson example shows outcome-based thinking for a single large deal.

And while a single large deal is great for that salesperson, there’s nothing radical about such an isolated example. By itself it doesn’t produce a major business impact. But what if someone could help 50 salespeople learn how to think and plan the way he did with the CIO? And 50 salespeople started closing large deals, repeatedly and consistently, because they knew how to have valuable conversations with their customers? Or 500 salespeople?

Radical Outcomes are tied to complex, high-stakes initiatives that yield tangible results. Examples include increased retention rates, improved acquisition rates, increased revenue, reduced costs, process improvements or efficiencies, increased profitability, increased word of mouth, increased conversion rates, and more upsell and cross-sell opportunities. These are or should all be measurable and quantifiable.

Here are the basic criteria that differentiate a Radical Outcome from something that is just run of the mill.

Executive Level, Cross Functional Stakeholders are involved. To drive change in the business where the impact is truly felt by customers, executive sponsorship is needed, usually because there will be so many different groups involved in working toward the outcome that it requires someone at the executive or business unit level of an organization to provide the endorsement of the initiative.

Results are achieved over time. Every executive wants change to happen “yesterday,” yet even so, it takes time for an organization to adapt and change, especially when the change itself is radical. Urgency defines the need for these changes, even ones that seem impossible to make. Most executives therefore expect to see roadmaps or plans that show how a change will take place, and they also expect to see consistent progress toward the outcome.

Results must be measurable and tied to the outcome. One of the most difficult things we’ve seen when clients are facing Radical Outcomes is determining what to measure so that progress can be conveyed against the outcome. Knowing that a change won’t happen overnight is one important guideline. Knowing what to measure and in what time frame are two additional guidelines.

The good thing about setting these guidelines? You can show the impact of what you have created. You can also more readily and accurately identify gaps and make the changes needed, quickly, in an agile manner, to meet the business outcome.
Radical outcomes actually make common sense and are comprised of tangible results. They’re the product of scope and scale, and something the executive level group is constantly envisioning. Imagine what would happen within your organization if you started having conversations about Radical Outcomes instead of just creating more stuff.

About the Author

Juliana Stancampiano, author of RADICAL OUTCOMES: How To Create Extraordinary Teams That Get Tangible Results is an entrepreneur and the CEO of Oxygen. For more than fifteen years, she has worked with Fortune 500 companies, both in them and for them. Her firm’s clients include Microsoft, DXC, Delta Dental (of WA), Starbucks, F5 Networks, Avaya, and Western Digital, among others. Her in-depth experience, along with the research that Oxygen conducts and the articles she has published, has helped to shape the perspective that Oxygen embraces. To learn more, visit: www.oxygenexp.com.

How Social Media Can Grow Your Business

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article | Social Media | How Social Media Can Grow Your BusinessIf you’re a business owner, you have likely heard about how social media has a way of spreading the word about your business, even if you no clue on why or how it achieves results. Although it can take a lot of work to maintain a number of social media accounts, the overall benefits for your business are innumerable.

It is well within your reach to use social media if the correct strategies are implemented. If you’re standing at the side-line watching your competitors take center stage by using social media to boost consumer interest, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be jumping on the bandwagon too.

Here are a few top reasons as to why you should be using social media as a method to grow your business:

1. Gets the word out about your business

Firstly, social media helps spread the message about your business and gets potential new customers talking about your product or service. You will gain plenty of recognition for your business and gain a platform to talk to your target audience. This will build trusting relationships that are crucial for business success.

Your followers and fans are likely to spread the word to their own contacts about your business if you make a good impression, which should go on to grow your customer base considerably.

2. It’s cost-effective

Unlike other forms of marketing, social media offers great return on investment – which is an important characteristic for any business.

Due to the changes in algorithms on Facebook , which is now favoring personal posts, you will need to make low-cost advertising part of your financial plan. These adverts are designed to promote your product or service to reach a large quantity of your target audience.

Learning how to budget effectively for marketing campaigns can be difficult, as you don’t necessarily know how effective they will be in the long-term or whether your finances are being put to good use. Many business owners choose to enroll onto a finance course to learn how to succeed in a technology-based world and understand the impacts of financial decision making, by studying an online MBA in Finance.

Many businesses spend so much money on failed marketing techniques, that they aren’t left with many funds to grow their business in other departments. Rest assured, social media has been proven to have a winning combination of cost-effectiveness and success.

StrategyDriven's Social Media Publication Timing Whitepaper


3. It’s extremely popular

Social media is growing exponentially in popularity and users of every age have accounts across a variety of platforms as a way of connecting with friends and finding out the latest news. Facebook has an impressive 1.7 billion users active each month and is most often the starting platform for small businesses looking to grow their following.

However, other platforms such as Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram are all used to grow the interest of a business. Instagram for example, has 1 billion active users per month and tends to generate business interest with the use of influencers. These accounts are paid to promote certain products or services to their own follower base, with the intention of generating traffic to the business account and website.

3 steps to creating a culture that retains your best employees

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article | Corporate Culture | 3 steps to creating a culture that retains your best employeesEmployees can do the minimum, or go the extra mile, and the difference between these two levels of performance, multiplied by the number of employees, can make or break a company. And when your employees are going the extra mile, it means they are engaged, and engaged employees don’t leave.

Losing employees is costly, especially if they are your best ones. Not only do they take specialist know-how and client relationships with them, but often straight to one of your competitors. And if you are operating in a context of skills shortages, which many companies are, you simply can’t afford to lose those skills you know are going to be impossible to replace.

The key to overcoming all of the above issues is culture, because as Peter Drucker famously said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Making sure your company culture is one that engages and retains your best employees is an ongoing endeavour, and there are three proactive steps you can take to build it:

1.Turn your company into a cause

Make sure you have a vision that is ambitious enough and inspirational enough to become a cause that employees rally around and makes them want to go the extra mile. Engagement for engagement sake will only ever bring short-term results; engagement around a cause, however, will keep your employees motivated for years.

Most companies have a vision, but with confusion rife around what a vision actually is, rarely do we find one with that essential emotional ingredient that makes employees put aside personal agendas for a collective one that appears much more attractive.

2. Set a minimum standard for people management

“People don’t quit companies, they quit their bosses”. How often have you heard this said? And how often on exit interviews do we find it to be true! This simple fact, disheartening as it might seem, is exactly the information we need to change our company culture.

By focusing on our people managers, and equipping them with the skills to better manage their relationships with their subordinates, we can minimise the loss of good employees because of bad management.

Giving feedback, for example, in a way that motivates rather than demotivates employees, is a skill in short supply among today’s line managers, but is something that can be easily taught and quickly put into practice.

3. Make Confidence a daily discussion

Confidence is discussed regularly in sports, because the sporting world knows that it is critical – that difference that makes a difference when athletes and sports people need to find that elusive next level of performance.

Confidence is multi-faceted and often misunderstood, but when discussed and worked on regularly, will make a huge difference not only to your employees’ performance but also their motivation. When employees are engaged, they will stay with your company, but you don’t just want them to stay, you want them to offer you their best performance possible. Confidence is the thing that moves them from commitment to action and gets them through turbulent times.

Creating a culture takes time, but results in a workplace where employees can give their best, making them feel good, and benefiting the company bottom line.

When you focus purely on Engagement, the tendency is to look to extrinsic and largely superficial motivations, such as gym memberships, extra holiday and shopping discounts, which only drive short-term results.

Investing in culture, however, addresses the more long-term and intrinsic drivers of human motivation – the need to grow as a person and make a difference – and sustainable Engagement, and employee retention, is the return that investment brings!

About the Author

StrategyDriven Corporate Cultures Article | 3 steps to creating a culture that retains your best employeesKaren J. Hewitt, author of Employee Confidence: The New Rules of Engagement, is an Engagement and Culture Change specialist who is fluent in five languages. Her book is a finalist in the Leadership category of the Business Book Awards 2019.

For information, please visit this link

Why AI-Driven Sales CRM is Leading the Way in Customer Relations

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article | Artificial Intelligence | Why AI-Driven Sales CRM is Leading the Way in Customer RelationsOver the last several years, AI has become a popular trend for enhancing all areas of business. With the ability of the machine to learn how to perform tasks like forecasting, clustering, text and speech recognition, error corrections, database filling, and other activities that involve human intelligence, AI has become an invaluable tool for sales teams to understand and interpret the behaviours of customers and suggest products for these customers. One of the critical factors, according to SuperOffice, behind the growth of CRM software is its ability to allow businesses to access customer data in real-time. Here are several ways that AI-driven sales CRM is leading the way in customer relations.

Collecting and Filling Data

It is no secret that marketing and various CRM applications require substantial sets of qualified data. Many of today’s new AI-driven sales applications have made it much easier to capture the corporate data that allows users to create and fill in the new information to solutions, as well as cleaning the existing lists. With this new technology, the need for data entry is eliminated with Spiro.

Clustering Contact Details

With AI applications you can structure, clean, and analyze the sales data you collect. After a series of algorithmic executions and iterations, the application can effectively provide you with the best model along with a pattern, which will allow you to group your customers. After the data has been clustered, it can give you a list of all the customers included in each of the groups. It will consider new sales and provide updated reports to improve marketing strategies.

Suggest Products

When a specific product is considered, the AI-driven application will provide you with a list of the various products purchased in the past by the customer. An excellent example of this in action is Amazon. When a customer is shopping at the online retail shop, it provides them with a list of suggested products that they might want to purchase. For B2B companies, the product basket of all their customers is carefully analyzed to interpret details like business sectors, employee’s numbers, address, and the revenues. All of this increases customer relations because the company doesn’t have to waste time suggesting products that the customer won’t be interested in purchasing.

Forecasting and Pattern Recognition

AI-driven solutions play a critical role in the process of the forecasting of sales, regarding production. Through pattern recognition, the trends of the purchase of a product over the years can be determined. Also, the success rate of the product can also be predicted, which can save companies thousands in unused and unsold inventory and can help increase revenue by nearly 41%, according to the site, Big Contacts.

Highlight Inconsistencies

The ability of a sales team to close sales is dependent on the accuracy of the sales pipeline. An AI-drive CRM application can effortlessly highlight any inconsistencies within the sales pipeline so that it can quickly be addressed. With accurate reports and sales forecasts, companies won’t have to worry about the sales process being slowed down or stopped because of inaccuracies.

The most prominent advantage of AI-driven CRM solutions is the ability to efficiently analyze the data of the company, which can lead to an increase in sales, better customer satisfaction, and better responses to customers’ needs.

Important Changes That Improve The Efficiency Of Your Shipping Operation

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StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article | Shipping Operations | Important Changes That Improve The Efficiency Of Your Shipping OperationOnline shopping has completely changed the face of retail and customers are increasingly buying products online and having them shipped directly to them. That means that people’s expectations are incredibly high when it comes to shipping times. There are a lot of big companies like Amazon that can offer next day shipping and, in some areas, even same day shipping. As a smaller company, you’re not necessarily going to be able to match that speed and efficiency, but you do need to make sure that you’re getting products out to people in a timely manner.

As well as speed, you also need to consider the cost of your shipping operation. If you’re not very efficient, you could end up spending a lot of money shipping products out and that’s going to seriously affect your profits. That’s why you need to make an effort to improve the efficiency of your shipping operation. These are some of the best ways to do it.

Improve Inventory Management

This is a step that a lot of people forget but it’s so important. Before you can ship anything out, you need to find the products in the warehouse and package them up first. If you’re not managing your inventory properly, it’s going to take longer than it needs to organize and pack all of the products ready for shipping. In some cases, you might find that you don’t have enough inventory to fulfill the order at all and that means you’re going to have a huge delay and you’ll probably lose that customer. It’s absolutely essential that you’re using good inventory management software instead of trying to do it all manually because that’s when you’re going to start making mistakes. You also need to set minimum stock levels so you can be sure that you’ve always got enough stock to fulfill any orders that are coming in. When you’re managing your inventory properly, you’ll find it a lot easier to pack and ship orders fast.

Better Communication With The Warehouse

Communication is the key to a successful business and it’s especially important when it comes to shipping. Good communication with the warehouse will help you with inventory management because they can let you know if you’re running low on certain things. It’s also incredibly important that they have a good idea of how sales are going. If you see a sudden sales spike and they’re not prepared for it, things are going to slow down and your products won’t go out on time. But if everybody is on the same page, they’ll be prepared for a sudden increase in orders and they can hire a few temporary staff members to help cover the extra workload. You should also have regular meetings with your warehouse staff to ask about any issues that they’re having. If they can help you to identify areas that are slowing things down, you can come up with solutions and improve your shipping efficiency.

Barcode Scanners

StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article | Shipping Operations | Important Changes That Improve The Efficiency Of Your Shipping OperationIf you’re running a large warehouse with a lot of products, finding the right products to ship is often the most difficult part of the process if you haven’t got a good solution. If you’re just handing somebody a list of products and asking them to find them, they’re going to be walking up and down for ages and that’s not efficient at all. The easiest way around that problem is to use barcode scanners. If you catalogue all of your products and assign them a barcode, it’s easy for people to scan lists of products and find what they need right away.

Consider Your Vehicles

The vehicles that you use for shipping make such a big difference so you need to consider them carefully. If you’re using delivery trucks that don’t get very good mileage, you’re just wasting a lot of money for no good reason. It’s worth looking into hybrids or electric vehicles that are a lot more cost effective to run. It also reduces your impact on the environment which is incredibly important to a lot of customers these days. If you can cut down on the amount of fuel you’re using, you’ll make some serious savings.

As well as finding more cost effective vehicles, you need to make sure that they’re well maintained. Take your vehicles to the mechanic and find an off-highway drivetrain service center to make sure that your delivery trucks are always in good working order. If your vehicles break down halfway through a route and your customers are left waiting for their delivery, they’re not going to be happy. They won’t be interested in your excuses and you’ll probably lose those customers for good. So, always keep on top of maintenance and make sure that you’ve got backup vehicles on hand to take over so you’re not missing any deliveries.

Use Route Planning Software

Route planning software is absolutely essential if you want to increase efficiency in your shipping operation. People don’t realize just how much difference it makes if you’re not planning routes well, but it can really slow things down. Trying to plan the most efficient route is a big job and you’ll struggle to do it manually. That’s why you should always invest in route planning software to help you out.

Use Standard Box Sizes

If you’ve got a lot of different box sizes, your employees will have to spend time finding the right box for each product when they’re packing them. It doesn’t seem like a big issue but if you add up those extra few seconds over the course of a day, it does actually waste quite a lot of time. You’re far better off using a few different standard box sizes so it’s quicker to pack products. It’s also cheaper to buy simple, standard box sizes rather than a lot of different custom made ones. Most large companies do this, that’s why you always receive things in oversized boxes when you order something from Amazon. The only downside is that some people might worry about you wasting resources but as long as you’re using recycled materials, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Decentralize Shipping

If you just have one large warehouse that handles all of your shipping, you might be making things harder than they need to be. When you’re in the early stages of your business and you don’t have that much money, having more than one shipping location probably isn’t viable. However, if you’re doing well and you’re looking at expanding the business and reinvesting some of those profits, you should consider decentralizing your shipping operation. If you’ve got multiple shipping locations that each serve a different region, you make things so much more efficient.

It cuts down on any long journeys which means you can get products out quicker and you won’t be spending as much money on fuel costs. Serving one local area rather than the entire country also means that your drivers will know the area better and they’ll be able to plan more efficient routes.

Manage Expectations

This is so important because customers are not going to be forgiving if their products are late. People won’t mind waiting a few days if that’s what they’re expecting, so you need to manage people’s expectations properly. It might be tempting to try to get more customers by offering unrealistic shipping times but it’s not going to work. You might get a few sales but you’re never going to keep those customers long term because you’ll let them down. You’re actually a lot better off over estimating how long your deliveries are going to take. That way, people are going to get a nice surprise when things arrive a day early and if there are any issues, you can still get things there on time.

Consider Outsourcing

Making all of these changes and improving efficiency in your shipping operation can be difficult. If you’re struggling, you should consider outsourcing to a professional courier instead. They’ll have all of the infrastructure in place already and they’ll have more experience in shipping so they can often do it better than you can. Outsourcing is a good solution for smaller businesses or new start ups that can’t afford to implement an efficient shipping operation.

However, there are some downsides to outsourcing. You’re not the only company that they’re dealing with so you aren’t going to be their priority. They may also not be equipped to deal with your products if they’re particularly fragile. In most cases, they’ll have experience but if you have any specific shipping needs, they might not be able to match them. That does mean there are more likely to be breakages and issues with products and you’ll be covering the cost of that. But outsourcing is still a way more cost effective way of handling your shipping operation.

Your shipping operation is one of the most important parts of your business. Customers have high expectations when it comes to product shipping and there are plenty of big companies that can get parcels out in a day or two. If you can’t compete with that, you’re really going to struggle to keep your customers.