When business is slow:
- Salesmen complain about the wrong products being developed
- Salesmen say Marketing is taking the wrong actions for lead generation
- Development blames Product Management for designing complex products with no demand requiring long development cycles.
- Development blames Company management for the high pressure to deliver the products faster.
- Quality Control is under such pressure of Management they don’t dare to stop the release of a product.
- Product Management reproaches Marketing for spending money on non effective events.
- Support is overwhelmed by the number of support call due to faulty products, incomplete manuals and the lacking Quality Control.
- Customer Service complains about the number of customer problems or guarantee.

Company management wants to take action and fires a few people in Sales and limits the budgets for Marketing.
They try hiring a few hot shots salesmen, but it could take ages before they close their first deals.
Meanwhile people get laid-off in Development, Administration, Customer service, HR, … the remaining people get too stressed because they have to take on the extra work and they are afraid to get fired too. The good people will seek interesting opportunities elsewhere and leave… until only the slackers remain.

When the market changes and business is growing:
- Salesmen close deals frequently and earn big commissions
- Marketing gets big budgets to spend for acquiring an even bigger market share
- Product management releases just the products needed as there is no pressure for more products
- Development has ample time and resources to create fine products
- Quality Control only releases fully tested products
- Support can easily handle the few and interesting support calls from happy customers
- Customer service is happy with the happy customers

Company Management gets more bonuses, stock options and cash in on their older stock options as the stock has increased in value.

Why should we blame our colleagues and co-workers in bad times?
When in good times the same people are all cheering together and the spirits are high.

Don’t blame it on sunshine
Don’t blame it on moonlight
Don’t blame it on good times
Blame it on the boogie

On Quora a question is asked: Which is better to work for, Google or Facebook?.
The answer to this question made the conclusion:
Google tends to value technology. Things are often done because they are technically hard or impressive. On most projects, the engineers make the calls.

Facebook values products and user experience, and designers tend to have a much larger impact.

This comparison forgets one company: Amazon – the bookstore, the Kindle system and Amazon Web Services.
Amazon has a diversified profitable business model selling products, services and values useful technology, whereas:
- Google is still a one trick pony: Adwords which they copied from Bill Gross from Idealab (Overture Services, Inc. – formerly Goto.com) who turned the idea and concept of keywords from Scott Banister into a business.

- Facebook has many people using the service but still it is uncertain if their business model is sustainable. The first sign of decay is apparent as teen move away from using Facebook.

Will Google come up with a new profitable business? Not just another Beta service with no business or another vehicle to sell Adwords?
Even Adam Rifkin of GigaOM declares that Google has no game !
Will Facebook be wiped out by the next social media or gaming portal, like what happened to MySpace?

Amazon generates profits from a growing number of successful multiple product lines like the Kindle and AWS.
AWS is even into Social Gaming as it provides the hosting that powers six to eight of the top ten Facebook games  like Zynga, Playfish and Playdom.

So who is the major force on the Internet ?
Amazon because it has different sustainable business and is able to reinvent itself on a regular basis with additional profitable businesses.

How sustainable is your business ?
Does your business have a back-up plan or alternative business ready to be executed ?

All is fine when you sign the deal:
- The goods or services
- The delivery date
- The payment terms
- …

Within the requested delay you supply the goods or services and promptly your company issues the invoice and has it send over to the customer by mail or email

Due date
As the due date is nearing you call up your contact and ask if the administration is processing your invoice. Of course your buyer confirms he will call the purchasing or accounting dept. to speed up the process.

When the due date of the invoice has passed by you ask the accountant or the accounts receivable clerk if he has received a payment from your client.
If not paid you call your customer again in the hope to the get them to make the payment. Your client informs you the administration of his company is processing your invoice.

The address is wrong: re-issue the invoice
A few weeks later the invoicing department or you receive a mail or email explaining the invoice was wrongly issued: the address of delivery was correct, but the invoice should be billed to a different address as the company headquarters or Registered Office is located on a different address. They still use the old building instead of the new facility.
How could you know as nobody ever told you.

The only solution is to re-issue the invoice with a different address and hope the customer will pay as soon as possible – but probably the customer will only pay within the agreed delay after receiving the new invoice.
Every few days or week your boss or even the CEO will ask about your unpaid invoice(s) until it becomes embarrassing.

There is nothing that you can do as the customer is king – especially when it comes to paying.
In any case this customer will not play this trick on you again (until he moves his Registered Office).

Managing your invoices, payment terms and payments are key for a successful business.

Cash flow
Using this method the customer doubles the payment terms and improves his cash flow.
The DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) simply doubles and your CFO or accountant gets nervous as his cash flow becomes a problem.

Sounds familiar to you ?

New product launch
When new products have been developed by the company corporate communications will issue a press release, marketing will promote and present the product with advertising and events to inform the potential customers to build awareness.

At the same time the salesmen need to learn the new product.
In most cases this is difficult to achieve as they are busy with contacting lead and selling the current products and following-up on their customers. That’s why boot camps for sales training were organized where they were cut off from their normal habitat. However the times of sales boot camps have passed by as people can continue to communicate with their customers and leads using cell and smart phones or wireless Internet.

Salesmen learn when:
Still salesmen will get a presentation and documentation in order to be trained on the new products.
A minority of the salesmen will learn quickly about the new products but the majority will have the wait and see attitude.

The best ways for getting a salesman to learn about the new products:
- When a lead or a customer asks about it or has a significant budget available.
- When a colleague earns a big commission
- When the margins on the new products are higher leading to higher commissions
- When the competitor steals his customers with a competing product
That’s when salesmen will learn the fastest.

Inciting salesmen
When launching a new product the best is when there is:
- a demand from the customers
- a big order giving a big commission to a colleague
- a competitor stealing customers
- a commission larger than average for the company

What incited or stimulated you to learn about a new product ?

The 40 hours week of work:
We (employees) probably work 40 hours a week – less all the coffee breaks and chit chat.
We do many things and have multiple experiences during this work week (even boring time consuming meetings).
To be fair: the commuting time to work needs to be added to these 40 hours.

During these 40 business hours we do our work, run the business and gain our income.

The 40 hours weekend:
A weekend lasts a little over 60 hours: from Friday 5 pm to Monday 7pm.
The 3 nights of sleep are consuming about 18 to 21 hours.
This making the amount of time available during a weekend about the same as the entire work week: 40 hours.

During this free time we spend most of our disposable income (or what’s left over after mortgage and utility bills).

Work vs weekend
Seems we have as much time to earn or income as we have time to spend our money.

So what did you do during:
- Last work week ?
- Last weekend ?
Anything significant ? Or just wasting time ?

People have a lot of time to themselves but seem to be more active or effective during business hours.
Make sure you spend your spare-time efficiently and well.
Life is too short to waste your time.

Remarks:
- Many entrepreneurs work almost the entire week by combining the two: working more than the 40 hours.
- The Internet and online businesses are active 24 / 7.

The common enemy
Throughout history leaders have used threat, danger or evil of an enemy in order to unify the forces of a country or organization. This has been used to fight anything from communism to terrorism.

The same method can be applied in order to build a team: define a common enemy and the employees will all line up.
When people have a common enemy they will stick more together and forget about their problems and differences with other team members as the enemy needs to be handled first. The enemy becomes the prime problem that needs to be solved.
The best is if you can nail down the common enemy to one organization representing all evil.

Finding the common enemy
The problem for the leader is finding the enemy who is accepted by all members of the team.
- All team members need to accept the common enemy else two groups will emerge in your team: those who follow you and those who object.
- Your organization or company needs to represent a positive feeling, whereas the enemy needs to include something negative.

In sales or marketing your nearest competitor can be used as the enemy.
Or even a different technology can suit as the enemy if you can make believe or can proof your technology is more advanced, uses fair trade or is ecological less polluting. The technology your company uses builds the team and differentiates them from the salesmen of the competitors.

Going out of business is also a common enemy but that will engage less as it is too omnipresent and very negative.

Advocates
The team building can be extended to your customers who can become your advocates.
Using a common enemy to extend the team beyond the company.
This what Apple is executing with every product they launch which they started with the ‘Big Brother Commercial’ in 1984 where the common enemy was IBM.
Since then the Apple products have been marketed as superior, having higher quality at a premium price and giving a better lifestyle compared to all others.
This has brought Apple many advocates (the so called ‘Apple Fan-Boys’)

Who or what is the common enemy of your company ?

Is the CEO serious ?
When the CEO, COO or VP Sales explains during a meeting their website is completely out of date and should be reviewed and renewed, we always wonder how serious they are about their business as they present the company to the world with products they no longer carry or services they have stopped providing.
Are they taking their job seriously ?

Would this CEO, COO or VP Sales handout their business cards with an old telephone number or an error in the address or email address ? Probably not.

Website relevancy important for executive compensation
Still they care less about the no longer relevant website, that gets visited by potential leads, customers, vendors / suppliers and financial institutions, than about their business cards.

The website will be visited by and will communicate to more people than the CEO, COO or VP Sales will ever speak to or meet.
All of these website visitors will get the wrong impression and will make the wrong conclusions and decisions. This will have a bigger impact than a business card with an error.
The status and being up-to-date of the website should be one of the priorities for the CEO, the COO and the VP Sales.
Hence the status of the website should relate to the executive compensation as it is the window of the company to world.

Is your website up-to-date ?

Business model perception: Google vs Amazon

The perception people have of your business model is most important as changing is almost impossible.

Google is free
Google is perceived as a free Internet service supported by advertising. Any other business model like paying for services they offer or software on an appliance are unlikely to become an instant success or will take long to succeed.
Whenever Google launches or promotes a paid service (Google Apps), people and companies abstain as they have perception of free services.
Google tries to lure in users or businesses by offering a free service of Google Apps (Freemium), but still the hurdle of paying remains.

Amazon is paying
People are used to pay for goods and services for Amazon. Purchasing books from Amazon with a credit card was from day one. It seems evident getting your credit card out when visiting any of their website.
When Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) for storage and cloud computing nobody grumbled about paying for these services.

The right perception from day one

If you going into business make sure the perception is correct from day one as changing later will only cost time, effort and money and will waste a lot of energy unnecessary.

- If you aim to supply quality products or services make sure you provide quality from day one.
- If you aim to have a premium pricing for exclusivity make sure you are exclusive at start.
- If you aim to address youngsters make sure your products and services target youngsters.

Changing the perception people have is utmost difficult to do and you probably have to lure people in order to get your customers.

Investigate the perception

You need to investigate in order to know what exactly the perception of your customers and potential customers is about your company.
This you need to keep in mind when designing and developing the next generation of products.
Launching a product that not matches the perception will only cost you money for marketing and promotion. Mostly wasted money as you will be trying to convince people to change their perception.

Whereas you put product on the market matching the perception less marketing is needed and advertising can limit itself by focusing on the benefits and features.

What perception have your customers of your company ?

The niche market expands
As a niche player you have a good business with reasonable margins and a slow sustainable growth.
As your market grows your revenue increases too.
The world seems perfect and the future is bright.

However your niche is becoming less a niche and your market gets a broader appeal and interest from more customers.
More competition will move into the market.
Soon even large corporations will acquire competitors or create their own products or solutions.

Competing with large corporations: not done
Competing with the large competitors is a battle that normally is won by the large corporations as they have the capability to scale in marketing, sales, manufacturing, logistics and distribution supported by their brand name.

Seldom has the niche player actually stayed leader in his market: only if he can achieve scalability in order to equal to the major corporations and coping with the growth of his organization.

At the moment the multinationals have overtaken the market, it is too late for any niche player to shift focus to another market as:
- the margins have become minimal due to the competition
- market share has decreased
- net income has become less
- money is drying up
Hence less cash available to invest in order to start-up in a new niche market.

The curse of the niche player: a market nomad
Niche players should start to plan to move on to a different niche market as soon the market opens up and new competitors enter the market.

At that moment the money gained should be invested in order to create new products or offerings and to develop the niche market.

Niche players should be nomads moving from one niche market to another every time the market expands significantly.
The curse of the niche players is being a nomad. A market nomad.

If you are working for a niche player, in what stage is your niche market ?
Is it time to look for a new niche market ?

Joint venture culture clash

When the COO of the American company asked for sales estimations to the Direktor Vertrieb (Sales manager) of the German company, he expected a spreadsheet with numbers.
Instead the Direktor Vertrieb gave sales estimations without any calculations.
The COO then asked where he got the numbers, the German replied “Aus dem Bauch” (just his best guess based on his gut feeling).

The problem is both people were working for companies that had joined forces in a Joint Venture.
The American COO almost went nuts. For him it was impossible to run a company based upon gut feeling. This was unheard of in a time of information systems, ERP and spreadsheets.

The rational American COO could demand for forecasts based upon calculations in a spreadsheet, but he had no power over the German Sales manager to oblige him.

The German Sales manager had no intention to go through all the required calculations as he was sure of his best guess. Moreover he had too much pride to succumb to the demands of the American COO.

Driven by his pride and prejudice the COO went out to calculate a myriad of spreadsheets as it was important for him to know and to have numbers based on assumptions, input from analysts and salesmen.
The numbers of the COO were used to plan the production.

About a year later it became clear the “Aus dem Bauch” numbers were near the realized sales, whereas the numbers produced by the COO were far off.

The German Sales manager had a decade experience in selling similar products into the market, whereas the COO not.
Experience counts more than all the number that can be assembled and mixed into the most complex calculations that are based upon certain assumptions.

Joint venture sufferings and oppositions

A joint venture is an organization that is difficult to manage as almost every aspect or habit of both companies can cause a clash that can make the joint venture fail.
Pride and prejudice are one of the main factors of failure.

When two cultures or company cultures meet many problems arise causing oppositions and sufferings at both sides. This is inevitable.
The sufferings and oppositions are the life and operations of any joint venture company.

Did you ever survived a joint venture ?