In part 1, you admitted that you read the dumb company: avoid the fork in the road and dead company walking: avoiding the graveyard articles (links in part 1), taken them to heart, admitted you’re making some mistakes and that you’re not doing some key functions as well as you could. Most importantly, you know you need to do more to avoid becoming a casualty of the next mass corporate extinction that’s coming. And you asked us to tell you what else you could do to avoid becoming a dead company walking (or, even worse, a zombie company*)? And yesterday we gave you our first five suggestions. Today we give you our next five.
06) Remember Websites are MORE than Static Web Pages
Your website should be a dynamic and interactive website that quickly guide visitors to the educational and informative content they want, with point-based and constructable demos, targeted education and thought leadership, and easy to find contact us options for information requests and specific live demos from thought leaders and solution professionals, not sales people. (Qualify the lead, then pass it on to sales.)
It should not, like the majority of websites today, be an overload of hogwash messaging and buzzwords, fancy animated graphics that don’t actually show the solution in use, a constant barrage of questions (along the “do you have trouble with …”) with the uniform “contact us for answers” directive. It definitely should not contain nonstandard terminology for modules, functions, and processes. (And definitely don’t mislead and say you’re an e-Procurement tool if you’re an e-Sourcing tool, and if you don’t know the difference, that just means you didn’t do your homework!) Confusing or non-existent information on target industries and market size (as we all know there is no one size fits all solution, and pretending that your company has one is just obnoxious). Or utter lack of information on pricing tiers and benefits. (Maybe you can’t give an exact price because you offer SSDO or advanced analytics that requires a lot of pay-per-use cloud processing, but you can still give a base license fee or range. If you’re a M+ annual solution, you don’t want companies that can’t, or won’t, pay more than 100K reaching out. The market should understand you get what you pay for and that a 100K solution won’t, or at least shouldn’t, have all the features of a 1M solution, but also that, if they are a smaller company, they shouldn’t need all the advanced features of the 1M solution either.)
07) Tap Your Talent for Top Tens
Sometimes the talent you overlook (because you think they are just a developer, pre-sales solution advisor, etc.) has the best ideas (and sometimes they don’t, and that’s why you use your leadership to filter out the best ideas).
If you have a problem, or just want to look for opportunities for improvement, ask your people first. Now, they won’t identify or come up with everything (as they have a limited view from a single function and may not have the decades of experience that is sometimes required to come up with something that is both “obvious” and revolutionary), but why should you pay a consultant to help you with improvements you can identify and make in house? You want the consultant focussed on the big win improvements you don’t see (and not easily sidetracked with the dozens of things you can do better).
So, ask all of your employees to come up with, anonymously if it helps, the
- ten best ways to save money,
- ten best investments across the business,
- ten best ways to improve productivity,
- ten SaaS apps you can do without,
- ten functions that would totally change customer productivity in your core offering
- ten functions that could be removed from the roadmap because they are actually low value,
- etc.
And while you will get a lot of pyrite, you will get some gold nuggets. And if you’re knowledgeable enough, you’ll be able to separate the gold nuggets out. (And if not, you’ve jump started your expert advisor with some unique insights into your business and your team and that will improve their productivity.)
08) Always Pause for Innovation
Regardless of how you interpret what we tell you in #10, if an opportunity for innovation presents itself, always pause to evaluate it and see if it is a true opportunity, fits in with the plan, and would make the product, and the plan, better. If it would make the plan better, and it wouldn’t slow progress down more than a small amount, work it into the plan. If it would make the plan better, but would slow progress down a moderately significant amount, put it on the roadmap to be considered in the next plan update (as new ideas might emerge that make it less of an impact by then). Moreover, when you stumble upon it, the right innovation will improve the product, the plan, and even the timeline.
09) Sign in Blood
Once you have a plan, sign your name to it in blood. The only thing worse than not having a proper plan is abandoning a good plan part way through (because you get too anxious or lose faith) … if, after investing a lot of time and effort, you abandon a plan part way through, you might as well just shut the doors now instead of retreating into the castle to starve as you wait out the siege. Greatness takes time, effort, and sometimes sacrifice.
10) Drive Decisions Like You Just Heisted the Antwerp Diamonds
Once you have a direction, don’t stop. Don’t pull over. Keep going until you successfully escape the EU, sorry, until you escape mediocrity and unprofitability. (And definitely don’t panic along the way. If you got out clean, and have 24 hours to make your escape, use every last hour, because once you cross the border, you’re off Scot-free.)
Once you have it all figured out and committed to, you have to be Hagar behind the wheel and drive, drive, drive. Slowing down will lead to stopping. Stopping to abandonment, and then, instead of improvement and success, it will be failure and the beginning of the end. As per 09, you have to see the plan through, and this will only happen if you never stop — you have to keep going as long as there is a drop of gas in the tank.
* yes, zombie companies exist in our space too; and, as the entertainment industry would have you believe, since we’re not medical doctors working in morgues with a constant fresh supply of brains, it is a fate worse than corporate death!