Tom Nixon

How to sell without selling

Alex Kjerulf posted some great questions to ask in a job interview today. It's worth a read if you're job hunting and food for thought for employers, but I was more interested in one of his earlier posts which he referenced. This one was about how to run 'happy' sales meetings.

I love the selling aspects of my job but I'm just not into pitches, presentations and all that jazz (don't even get me started on tendering!) The best way to sell (for me anyway) is to:

• have a conversation;
• listen;
• be honest;
• give away as much knowledge as you can for free

...and if all of that goes well, then why wouldn't someone buy from you?

Anyway, back to work... only 2 days left of the month and I have a sales target to hit! :)

Your colleagues might be happier than you think

A couple years ago, I used to run a weekly online survey of our team here. It was just seven questions and it was intended as a way to 'take the pulse' of the company - not from a profit/loss point of view, but to gauge how everyone was feeling at that moment. I've been thinking recently about starting this up again, and it reminded me of an interesting thing that we discovered.

The first two questions were:

Looking back over the last week, how happy are YOU in your job right now?

and

How happy do you think the rest of the team are right now?

...with a scale of 1 to 5 from 'Utterly fed up' to 'Very happy'.

The interesting/weird thing was that the answers to the two questions very closely followed each other but 1 point lower. So generally everyone was either a 4 or 5 on the happiness scale for themselves, but thought that the rest of the team was only a 3 or 4.

I don't know whether this was a quirk of our team here or whether this happens everywhere. I wonder why people think other people aren't as happy as they really are? Maybe we should all take more of an interest in how happy our colleagues are.

We don't work for jerks

Sometimes it's hard to resist the temptation of taking on a client who has money to spend but who, well, just isn't a very nice person. David Maister's advice? "Don't work for jerks."

Some good stuff from Tom Peters

Tom Peters has put up a couple of really cool posts on his blog today.

First, he tells us: Don't forget why we're here - a post about how it's easy to lose sight of why you went into business (or political office, or whatever) in the first place. A good reality check!

Then a great post about how companies that centralise power (and thinking) cause stagnation. You can blame management for this, but it's down to the employees as well - a bit like Sheepwalking. The conditioning starts early on in life:

...we tell our kids in school to "sit still, follow the rules, and behave."

This is fine if you want a generation of sheep, following orders and not thinking for themselves, but aren't we beyond that now?

From freelancer to thriving small business: Top 10 tips.

Being a successful freelancer means that you are already running a business. But if you want to grow your business into something larger then you have to do a number of things differently. I learned most of these things by making mistakes. I hope they'll help you to do things better first time around.

1. Get out of the bedroom and into some shared office space
When you first start working from an office you instantly feel like more of a real business and it makes it much easier to take on your first employee. Working from an office sends a signal to clients and suppliers that you are serious, and you can often make good connections with other small businesses through your office. Do this as soon as you can. If you take on the office on flexible terms you can always move out if you can't afford it.

2. Raise your prices NOW
If you are providing an excellent service to your clients that gives them real value then they will not be price sensitive. You need to raise prices so that you can phase out unprofitable work and clients that take up your time without much reward, and to build up some cash to get you through the inevitable dips and bumps you'll have along the way. Make sure you communicate things clearly to clients, but don't be apologetic - they get great value from you, and it's in their interests for you to be financially secure.

3. Get a proper sales function going
When you're a freelancer you can keep a list of potential new clients and projects in your head. This isn't good enough for a growing business. You need to maintain a pipeline of sales opportunities and track what stage they are all at (qualification; needs analysis; quote/proposal; negotiation) so that you can see whether you have enough new business to keep you busy in the future. We use the free Sugar CRM for this. You also need to learn to qualify each new opportunity before you invest time on it: Can the client afford it? Is the project really likely to go ahead? Have I got a good chance of winning the business? You can do all of this in one phone call before you agree to meet a new prospect or write a proposal.

4. Get the right blend of full-time and freelance people
Freelancers are great: You can use them on projects when the work is there, but they don't add to your monthly overheads, keeping your running costs low. But freelancers come and go and they won't care as much about your clients and projects as you do. So hire permanent staff for key roles like project management. If you use freelancers for technical work make sure that they document what they have done because they might not be around when someone else has to pick up from where they left off.

5. It's still all about cash
When you're freelancing, finance is simple: you just need to keep an eye on your bank balance. When you grow a business, it's easy to lose sight of cash when you have many more incomings and outgoings. It's important to track how much you are invoicing each month (keep a total on a whiteboard in the office, or post it on your intranet) but invoices are no good to you until you are paid. Chase your debts like mad and set up payment terms that will get cash into the bank quickly. And if clients aren't paying, halt the work.

6. Act quickly with people issues
Trust your instincts, and if things aren't working out in the way you need them to, act fast or the problem will only get worse. When you're a small business, each employee represents a significant percentage of the overall workforce and you just can't afford to have a big chunk of your business not performing. The first (and only) time I have had to let an employee go was one of the most horrible things I've ever had to do, but the sense of relief when it was done was enormous. But that's a last resort, and if you stay close to your people and talk to them regularly you can deal with issues before they become a problem.

7. Know what help you really need
One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was thinking that to grow the business I needed someone to help me to sell more. With hindsight it turned out that what I really needed was a project manager who could get the work done to free me up to go out and find new projects. Good sales people are probably the most difficult people to find, and you may be the best person to sell your company's services for quite some time. Since you're going to be building a team around you with complementary skills, you also need to understand what it is that you're really good at, and what you enjoy the most. Then find people to fill gaps.

8. Get your finances very VERY organised
This one has taken me years to get right. I've experimented with looking after finance personally (great for keeping close to the numbers but bad use of my time and not what I'm good at); using a book-keeper (cheap, but mistakes were made and hard to detect); outsourcing all book keeping and accounting (made sure everything was in order, but too far removed from the day-to-day running of the company). Now we have a part time finance director who ensures that we have the right processes in place for finance and the reporting we need to understand what's going on. You need to have someone you can REALLY trust looking after your books and providing the reporting. Someone who tells YOU what you need, and not the other way around. Get this in place early on when your finances are much simpler as it takes a huge amount of time to fix things later on.

9. Get to know your bank manager when times are good
Don't wait until you're desperate for an overdraft to see your bank manager. Visit them a few times each year to tell them about your business and show them your financial reporting. What they like to see is REAL information - not just a profit and loss statement, but a list of the actual projects you are working on; what you have invoiced and what you are expecting to invoice over the next few months. Don't just go in with a figure of 'We won XXXX worth of new business last month'. List the projects and tell them what your profit margins are. This will help them to understand your business, and they'll be reassured that you're so organised. This all helps when you need to ask your bank manager to help you out.

10. Create a great company culture and have fun
All organisations have a culture, be it good or bad. Don't let yours develop by chance. Make conscience decisions about how you are going to engage your people and make your company a great place to work. I recommend being highly transparent and participative about decision-making, strategy and finance. Trust your people, give them freedom and respect, and they will help you to build an amazing business.

Good luck :)

Democracy and diversity

I've been reading up on diversity in preparation for a panel discussion entitled 'Workforce Diversity - Nice Idea, Bad Business?' at the Future is Female Conference next week. I'd just love to see someone try to argue that diversity is bad for business in front of a large group of smart women. They'd get torn to shreds! And rightly so. It's not a subject I know much about so please send me an email if you've got any thoughts, insights or ideas about it. In particular, any real life examples of diversity working well or presenting challenges would be great.

Just discovered in this profile about Traci Fenton of Worldblu that diversity is one of the underlying principles of democracy, be it at the level of government or in a workplace that aims to be democratic like Nixon McInnes. So clearly it's an important subject. Please do let me know what you think either by email or in the comments section.

Fully hydrated

I'm feeling really stupid today. Apparently it's a myth that drinking 8 glasses of water each day is essential to keeping you hydrated. I've been doing this for years, thinking I was really virtuous until I saw a feature about it on a TV programme a couple of weeks ago. At the time I ignored it because of the gonzo science they used to prove the point, but I just read it again in this article:

Another urban legend people believe is the notion that you should drink eight glasses of water every day. It is false. To those people who are waterlogged and running to the bathroom about four times an hour, you can cut it out—you're fine, you're fully hydrated.

Not only is it false, I have actually fallen hook, line and sinker for an urban legend. It's funny how we resist evidence that goes against ideas we take for granted. It's hardly like I was passionate about drinking water. Easy to see how religion survives in the face of scientific evidence. I wonder what other things I'm doing whilst being blissfully unaware that they're a complete waste of time.

Seriously frustrating

Time to beat: 15 minutes 45.49 seconds (I think that's quite a poor score)

Play 'Pointer'.