Earlier this week I was talking with some business friends on how large (or small) a persons network needs to be able to achieve certain business and life goals. These are the figures they came up with but I’d be interested in any feedback. What was interesting is how small the groups are when people are working for a person’s success

• To be able to move jobs easily…between 100 & 500 at appropriate level
• Success in a new job…team + boss + key influencers
• To have a successful on-line sales business…over 10,000 contacts in list
• To be famous… 10-25 team of promoters, press agents (accepted that fame is relative)
• To have Social Media, press, TV Influence…25,000 – 100,000 followers +
• To be happy…between 5 and 25 very close friends

Completely unscientific and after a few glasses of wine but what is interesting is that the smallest figure is the one for happiness.

Did you see the BBC 2 programme on the wealth management industry last Tuesday.
I was fascinated at how many people rely on this type of development programme and spend thousands of pounds on the basis of a “taster session” in a hall with two or three hundred other people.

Would it be more sensible to spend the same amount of money bringing together a team of experts and seeking their advice by interviewing them, taking up references and undertaking some sort of assessment of worth before buying.

Is it greed, is it laziness, is it the times we are in
and who’s making the money?
or
am I missing the point?

A friend asked me yesterday: “How do I bring my team to life?”.

He’s setting up a new business team for a new product and wanted to discuss how he could enthuse them. After talking about culture, alignment to the task and mission critical outcomes  we then looked at the team from the employees point of view.

I shared with him a three point strategy for team building that I often find team leaders find interesting and here are some of the expectations we discussed but from a team member’s point of view:

To be a good team leader you need to “Discover me”

• Recruit for my strengths but understand my weaknesses
• Find out how I learn best
• Discover what interests me
• Understand my aspirations                        

To gain my enthusiasm you need to “Steer Me”

• Show me the course we will be sailing and the points we’ll see on the way
• Describe to me what end of the journey (success) looks like
• Provide coaching and mentor me
• Protect me along the journey so I don’t fall overboard                  

Support me

• Be my biggest fan
• Celebrate with me my successes and tell everyone else
• Challenge me to do better and bigger than even I thought I could
• Commit yourself to my success as an individual part of this team

Yesterday I had an interesting meeting with my good friend Warren Cass, the founder of Business Scene, discussing what type of speakers audiences were wanting to hear at networking events and business conferences.

My contribution, as a business speaker, was that I’ve noticed that audiences have changed what they are wanting to hear from the stage. I’ve detected that audiences are no longer willing to listen to the motivational speaker
encouraging the audience to “Do it like I did” or the “How to
improve…” talk or even worse the “I’ve written a book you’ll love to
buy” talk. Instead they are wanting information that’ll help them, and their business teams, survive and even prosper in the future and through these difficult times.

The future of speaker’s keynotes
I predict that the during 2012 people will be wanting to hear speakers offer an opinion on what the future holds, practical tips on how to survive the economic downturn and how teams can be made more efficient and profitable. That’s not to say that people want to be bored to death or filled with statistics, they won’t put up with that either! The talks will have to be entertaining, energetic and full of information. An interesting time for the future of the conference speaker and for those booking them for their audiences.

Yesterday I was at the Great British Business Show at Earls Court and saw loads of friends. However, despite so many people attending the show it was not a success for me and, from the feedback I received, wasn’t a success for many other people as well.

What went wrong:

• To start with I had to queue for twenty minutes to get into the show and when I arrived at the check-in desk was told that I was in the wrong queue and had to join another. (I left the queue and walked in without registering!)
• Once inside I found that there was no show guide. So finding information on the location of exhibitors, seminar presentations was more difficult than it needed to have been.
• Too many of those exhibiting seemed unsure how to engage with visitors to their stands.
• More than one exhibitor was handing out very heavy (300 page) catalogues that were dumped at the exhibition because I didn’t want to carry them around London for the rest of the day
• Two events were being held in the same hall, despite being marketed separately “Great British Business Show” and the “Business Start-up Earls Court”. Very confusing for attendees

This is the second event that I’ve recently attended that I thought poorly organised, an HR event a month ago at Olympia, that had so few visitors to it that I was probably one of a couple of hundred people in the hall. Naturally the exhibitors were packing up early and I gather were “Meeting with the organisers” to complain.

I’m interested in the experience of other exhibition visitors

With sales margins being pushed south I was reminded, yesterday, by a sales Director of a statement that I made from a conference stage a few years ago “Sales teams are often blamed for poor sales when it’s not their fault”.

So who or what is to blame?
Too often sales teams limp along with undiagnosed problems when a “new process” is implemented in the hope that it will have immediate improvements. In my experience there are a number of issues that need to be considered before rushing into another and potentially expensive new sales process. These include:

• There is little understanding how departments such as legal, accounts and IT impact on sales
• Senior managers don’t appreciate how the existing sales process works
• People don’t understand why the business makes sales and more importantly loses sales
• Too few of the sales team contribute too much of the sales result
• Sales forecasting is based on “Gut feeling” and “Hope”
• Sales forecast is made on a short term basis (This month or next)

Take time
There are many actions that can be taken to solve the above list but “blaming the sales team” isn’t always one of them. Instead correctly diagnose where the business needs to look for improvements in the sales cycle. The other thing to remember is that there’s no pill that will provide instantaneous results. Time, good analysis and correct implementation needs to be taken when delivering sales improvements.

I’ve noticed over the past few months that many businesses are concentrating on restructuring their sales teams as part of their business strategy. The problem is that so mant sales appointments fail to deliver what was anticipated.

Sales teams have contacted me to advise on how to select good salespeople. The point I always make is that whilst the interview is useful always worth check on the information given by the candidate. Follow up references,  check sales statistics given for previous posts and so on.

The next step is to integrate the individual into the team. Relying on just past experience for the individual to succeed is a recipe for job failure too often. Remember that only 60% of new hire salespeople succeed.The 40% that fail cost huge amounts of management time and lost opportunity costs.

I had to laugh at Management Today’s article on Ryan Air’s plans to replace toilets on their planes with paid seating.

Famous for its cut-throat approach
to cost-cutting the budget airline plans to remove two of its loos and replace them with up to six extra
seats but as MT asks “Is its latest ruse literally taking the piss”. 

Planning meetings:
We can only imagine the suggestions that the management team come up with at cost-cutting planning meetings. Presumably
they’ve considered building on the priority boarding model by charging for in-flight
commodes. this could be a money earner whilst saving passengers having to get up from their seat mid-flight.

It should be noted that there’s no legal stipulation for
an airline to provide toilets on its aircraft. It’s just if you’re supplying loads of beers to stag parties off for the weekend it would seem sensible to keep the seats dry for those coming back on the return journey!
Or will dry seats cost extra in the future?

Maximum seats allowed
As Ryanair proposes to prevent passengers from squeezing one out at one
end, it’s simultaneously doing the squeezing at the other: The airline carries an
estimated 75m passengers per year, and currently flies only Boeing
737-800 and has installed 189 seats on each plane, the maximum
allowed under current rules and it also charges up
to £20 per piece of checked luggage per flight. The Office of Fair Trading is investigating a ‘super-complaint’ by
the Consumers’ Association into such charges by low-cost airlines.

It’s not often that I blog twice in one day but I’ve been motivated by two pieces of news today. The first came from the BBC who predict that 1 in 4 children will grow up in poverty within the next ten years. The second piece of doom and gloom news was reported in Management Today that said “More doom and Gloom as BCC cuts UK growth forecast”.

The end of the world is nigh!
The world seems to be talking itself closer to the precipice faster than the village idiot saying that the end of the world is nigh! Quite frankly I’m tired of listening to doom and gloom merchants. Now I understand that good news doesn’t sell newspapers or advertising space on TV but can’t we have some success reported. There’s so much out there!

Successes
Such as the hugely successful and multiple award winning Riverbanks Clinic. Only recently established but already one of the UK’s leading Aesthetic Medicine Clinics and run by a brilliant team of dedicated professionals.

That Selfridges was voted the “Best Department Store in the World” at the Global Department Store Summit in New York in 2010

Lebara, the mobile phone company, that won the UK Customer Service award at the Mobile News Awards 2011

there’s so much good news to talk about do you know any other business success?
If so, let’s start to publicise them.

I was interested to read that the future of the government’s Work Programme “hangs in the balance” as research has revealed that 90 per cent of contracted Work Programme providers will miss their targets to get people back into work.

“The future of this vital employment scheme hangs in the balance,” said Ian Mulheirn, Director of the SMF.  “The programme aims to get some of the hardest to reach people off benefits and into work, but past performance shows that providers will be unable to meet the criteria required of them by the DWP”. As reported in Management Today

The statistic raises a number of questions:

• Were the targets too high?
• Were the providers promising too much in their application for the contract?
• Were the providers competent?
• Is the economic downturn so deep that it makes delivery impossible?
• Are employers just not employing?
  

No doubt the answers, arguments and “justification” will depend upon being in Government, Providers or DWP.
 
Perhaps they’ll all blame the unemployed!

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