Category Archives: Finance

Alignment, Analysis, Business, Conflict Management, Finance, Sales

Conflicting Internal Forces

I have talked in the past about the three internal organizational resources required for business success, and their trade-offs and interrelationships: Time, People and Money. The idea that if you have less time than desired to achieve a goal, it will require the expenditure of more people and more money to achieve it. If you have fewer people for the goal it will require more time and money. And so on.

I am now going to talk about the driving internal functional forces that are acting upon desired organizational goals. There are again three of them and to put them at their simplest, they are Sales, Finance and Engineering. I think in order to be a little more accurate it would be better to look at the conflicting goals of each of these functions with respect to the desired goal of the organization, instead of just the function itself.

The goal of sales is to get orders. There may be additional sub-requirements placed on them, but it is almost always quota attainment, as it pertains to orders, that is the measuring stick for sales. Achieve your sales order goal as a salesperson, and you get money, fame, glory, respect and most importantly, you get to keep your job. Fail to achieve your sales order goal and you don’t get the money, fame, glory or respect. More importantly, perhaps the first time you fail you may get a pass on keeping your job, but probably not the second time.

Sales in general doesn’t really care about finance or engineering. This is primarily because they are not paid to care about them. They are paid (usually in the form of commissions) to get orders. Sales usually wants the highest quality and lowest price possible as this helps enable their sales. The greater profitability desired by finance usually means a higher price, which usually makes sales more difficult. Sales will usually align with engineering on generating the highest quality solution but diverge when the costs of such solutions are taken into account.

The goal of Finance is margin or profitability. Again, there may be other sub-requirements, but finance’s primary role is to make sure that the organization brings in more money than it spends. Finance keeps score. It’s not enough to just bring in more than you spend. Finance quantifies how much more money needs to be brought in than is spent so that the business’s ongoing and future success can be assured. Future investments and corporate overheads (as well as salespeople’s salaries and commissions, etc.) have to be paid for.

Finance is usually focused on what could be called the margin percentage versus margin value balancing act. It is desirable to have a high margin percentage and high profitability on each sale. However, having high margins with low volumes will not generate enough profit to drive the business forward. Just as a high volume of sales with low margins will not generate the desired margin value. There is a desired financial equilibrium where both margin percentages and values are maximized.

The goal of Engineering is to make sure that everything gets done right. Engineering makes sure that products and solutions are configured properly. They make sure that components and solutions are available in the desired time frames. They make sure that services are costed and allocated correctly. In short, they make sure that the organization can in fact do whatever the salespeople are trying to sell.

Engineers are also believe that they are the primary group responsible for doing the people, time, money, analysis. Engineers are not usually interested in the sales aspect, other than recognizing if there are no sales there is no need for engineers. And they are not particularly focused on finances, as margin and profitability again have little direct effect on them. They are usually focused on the accuracy of the solution and will include whatever they deem appropriate (the people, time, money resources) to that solution to make it ever more accurate.

Of the three functions, sales is probably the most difficult. Sales is competing with external entities for each order, in addition to trying to balance the internal goals associated with the financial and engineering functions. Finance and engineering are only associated with internal functions, including sales. There is no competing engineering or finance function claiming that their financial wizardry or engineering prowess is superior. When they are forced to deal with external forces, it usually only through sales.

When these internal functions, and their associated goals are in balance, an organization can operate at near its peak efficiency. Sales pushes for orders, finance makes sure the sale is profitable and engineering makes sure that the sold solution is done correctly. Life can be good.

It is when an organization gets out of balance that we start to see significant issues. When an organization becomes too sales focused, margins and profitability can begin to slip as the quickest way to increase sales is to reduce price (this is just baseline economic theory). We saw an example of this some time ago when some stocks started being valued based on the assumptions of future sales and sales growth instead of the more standard stock and organizational valuation criteria. These stocks eventually came crashing down when it was realized that they would in fact have to start making money if they wanted to stay in business, regardless of how much they sold.

When an organization becomes too financially focused, growth, expansion and development can slow, again causing issues for the organization. Strategic opportunities can be missed because they may be deemed to either represent too much risk, or not enough return (margin) to be pursued. Being too safe from a financial point of view can be just as deadly to an organization as being too risky and focused only on sales.

With the increased global awareness and focus on the “cost of non-quality”, or more accurately the cost of not doing things right, there seems to now be an organizational drift toward becoming more engineering focused, since they are the organizational force associated with doing things right. I also think that this approach potentially has the greatest capacity for generating corporate issues in the future.

When an organization becomes engineering focused it has a tendency to lose sight of both sales and finance. With decreased input and parameter focus from sales and finance, engineering will continue to focus on accuracy and reducing the risk of an incorrectly engineered solution, almost to the point of trying to generate perfection in its solutions.

The issue here is that perfection usually comes at a very high cost.

Finance will continue to try to demand specific margin levels, while sales will want lower prices to enable the generation of orders. This is the recipe for the perfect organizational storm. Engineering generated increasing costs, finance generated desired margin levels, and sales generated reduced pricing demands to meet the market competition.

The point here is that the market, more or less, sets the market price for the organization’s goods or services. There can be some variations, sometimes based on the quality of your sales team, sometimes based on the quality of your solution, and sometimes it is based on other factors (such as the regulatory exclusion of a competitor from the market, etc.). If you raise your prices too much in response to the engineered increase in costs, sales volumes and hence margin values will decline. If you reduce margin percentages, again margin values can decline. This can become a lose-lose situation.

The organization won’t make any mistakes, but it may not generate enough business, or margins to survive for very long.

In allowing an organization to become engineering focused, you start down the road to becoming a cost-up pricing organization. This is the least market responsive type of organization. Since engineering nominally has no focus or interest in sales or margin, when an organization becomes engineering focused, it becomes almost entirely internally focused.

It is usually the position of the market that an organization that loses its focus on the customer or the market, doesn’t get to enjoy the benefits of that customer or market for very long.

Engineering in an organization is about reducing the risk associated with achieving a goal. But like everything else, this risk avoidance comes with a cost. It is not enough to tell engineering to make sure that the solution is correct. This direction invariably leads to the inclusion of all kinds of failure avoidance constructs, and their costs to be included in the solution. And since engineering can be a complex function, there are few outside of the engineering function that can understand or question it.

In the long past world of “Five Nines” of reliability, this was once the recipe for success, but in today’s “short life-cycle” disposable product world, few can afford it, and even fewer are willing to pay for it.

I mentioned earlier that engineers see themselves as the group that is responsible for solving the Time, Money, People resource equation. It is obvious that when none of these parameters are set, the solution is much easier to obtain. And without limits to these parameters, the costs of the risk-adverse solution can grow quite large. Organizations need to understand that the Time, Money, People equation requires parameters to be set. Time frames and budgets need to always be set before being handed to engineers to configure a solution.

Engineering is a key component to any solution. The functional internal conflicts between sales, finance and engineering will always come into play, and must always be balanced out. As organizations seem to continue to drift into a little more of an engineering-centric approach to customers and solutions, it should be safe to assume that left unchecked, the commercial and financial aspects of these solutions will re-emerge in the customer decision making process.

It is safe to say that you do indeed get what you pay for, but it is also safe to say that sales will have difficulty selling, and customers are probably not going to be willing to pay for an over-engineered solution of any type that does not take into account their commercial needs.

Business, Customers, Finance, Sales, Strategy

Esoteric Value

“Don’t sell the steak. Sell the sizzle.” is a sales canon that dates back to The New Yorker Magazine in 1938. Elmer Wheeler is the man credited with coining it. It seems Mr. Wheeler was one of the first pioneers in persuasive selling. He was one of the first to recognize the value in presenting a customer the choice in buying one thing or another thing (something and something) instead of the choice of buying or not buying (something and nothing). He was successful. Sales teams have been trying to emulate him, and his success since.

His approach works well when dealing with an end-user customer. The person buying the steak, or getting their oil checked, or buying a malted milk (these were actual examples in the 1938 article) can readily be replaced by those purchasing Mobile Phone packages, automobiles or Television / Internet packages for their homes. It is still about buying one thing or another, not about buying or not buying. These are consumers making discretionary purchase decisions.

For the most part these are all examples of Business-to-Consumer selling opportunities. The person buying is the person using the capability being sold. It is when you start looking at the idea of Business-to-Business selling that the concept of “sizzle” can become a little more esoteric. In business, there are very few discretionary purchase decisions that get made. It is usually decided that you can use it to make money or save money, or you don’t buy it.

Businesses for the most part are financially or profit driven. I say for the most part as there are several that purport to serve the greater good, and by their designation as a “Non-Profit” organization enjoy a different tax treatment. There are also those that are regulated as to how much they are actually allowed to charge and or make as a profit. Even so, these regulated firms are also somewhat profit driven.

What they are not is “sizzle” driven.

Yes, it is true that organizations are made up of people that can be influenced by something other than profitability, but the organization as a whole, through is management structure, its purchasing process and more importantly in many instances, its stock price will not be “sizzle” driven. Being fashionable or exciting or being a market or technology leader is interesting. It may have some ephemeral effect on the organization, or how the market perceives it, but in the end, it will be the financial performance of the company that dictates how it ultimately is perceived.

If you want to stay in business, profitability will be key. It is about making money, and about how those things that the organization purchases can be used to make more of it, this quarter, this month, today.

Steve Jobs is famous for many quotes. Part of one of his more famous quotes contains the following line:

“Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do”

This is spoken like a true technology genius, especially when he is referring to a set of consumers and end-user customers that are not technology geniuses. Jobs was brilliant at anticipating consumer “wants” (as opposed to needs – no one “needs” an iPhone, or an iPod, etc.) and then putting together a product package that would then create a new market.

He identified what you would want and then created the package that you wanted it in. Like I said, he was a genius.

However, when you are working with businesses, it is somewhat different. The businesses normally require something called a “business case” (see what I did there? Business – business case? It’s important.) before they are going to spend money on anything, whether it is a new hire, an internal development, or an externally supplied product or service. It has to make business sense, or more simply put, it needs to generate more value for the business than it costs the business to do.

There is a myriad of ways to describe the generation value for a business, but I have found that they can usually be simplified down into one of two categories: Value can be created by enabling the customer to generate more revenue, or value can be generated by enabling the customer to reduce their costs. Both of which usually result in greater earnings and profits, which ultimately increases the value of the company (usually in the eyes of the shareholders or owners).

Many times, companies like to tout their future capabilities when selling to other companies. It is important to have a direction and strategy for the future when talking to customers. They too want to know where their suppliers are going and what they expect the market to need or want in the future. But there is a significant gap between the value of a business case for today, and the value of a business case for the future.

The business case of today involves products and services designed to meet defined requirements, solve existing issues and deliver present value in the form of increased sales or reduced costs. The needs exist. The products exist. And the relationship between them can be well defined. The amount spent, and the value received, either immediately or over the defined period of the business case can be calculated. It is truly the decision between buying one vendor’s solution and buying another vendor’s solution (again, the decision between buying something and buying something else).

It is when new products or capabilities are introduced ahead of or in anticipation of the business customer’s need, that the business case relationship can become somewhat esoteric.

When trying to anticipate the business customer’s future needs, the impetus is on convincing them that your specific view of the future is to correct one. They must then balance that out against their customers needs, wants and desires to see if that anticipation makes sense in the form of a business case.

Many times, there can be a general consensus among the supplier organizations about what the future state of an industry may look like, but unless that vision can be quickly converted into increased customer revenues, or reduced operating expenses, the future solution will have to wait. Most organizations can no longer afford to spend money in anticipation of what they think their customers will need or want. They would rather wait and make sure it is what they need or want.

Remember present value is always better than future value.

Part of the issue with “future” products is that they don’t necessarily translate to definable value. They are usually described as “platforms” for the future, or that they will enable “future applications”. In short, they don’t clearly define and quantify how the business customer is going to generate new revenues and how much those revenues might be, or how they are going to reduce their costs and how much those cost reductions might be. They have only half of a defined business case. The purchase or the cost half.

They do not have the benefit half of the business case defined.

Without the definition of those future applications or services or values or cost reductions it is difficult to make a case where an organization will feel comfortable spending today’s money on an undefined future value. In short, very few businesses will gamble today’s money on an undefined future value. It makes much more sense for them to actually wait on the future than to bet on the future.

As I said earlier, companies are in business primarily to bring value to their shareholders and their owners. The do this by generating earnings and profits. They do that generating greater value on products and projects that the money they spend executing them. They make more money than they spend on these ventures.

When a business is trying to sell a good or service that cannot clearly define the value that it will generate for the customer, either in the present or the future, it always makes more sense for the customer to wait on that particular buying decisions. This is the definition of deciding between buying something and not buying (buying nothing).

Regardless of the sizzle that a company may claim that accompanies their product or service, in the case of buying today based on predicted future needs and capabilities, the steak, and its relatively definable value will usually be of much more interest to the business customer. Especially when it comes time to review the value generated for the customer. And even more so when that sizzle is still just a future sizzle.

Creativity, Customers, Finance, Leadership, Sales, Value

Would You Like To Buy The Brooklyn Bridge? – An Infrastructure Sales Story

I have been thinking a lot about infrastructure lately. There are many different types of infrastructure out there. While I am primarily in the High-tech infrastructure environment, almost every other industry has its own type of infrastructure (think oil, airlines, brewing, etc.) and for me, it is hard not to think about things like the Brooklyn bridge when you start talking about infrastructure. I think by way of analogy, I’ll stay with bridges in general and the Brooklyn bridge in particular for this discussion, because it enables me to make the general points I want to make about infrastructure sales and business decisions, and there are a ton of very cool facts that I was able to discover, and hence would like to share.

“The Brooklyn Bridge looms majestically over New York City’s East River, linking the two boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Since 1883, its granite towers and steel cables have offered a safe and scenic passage to millions of commuters and tourists, trains and bicycles, pushcarts and cars. The bridge’s construction took 14 years, involved 600 workers and cost $15 million (more than $320 million in today’s dollars). At least two dozen people died in the process, including its original designer. Now more than 125 years old, this iconic feature of the New York City skyline still carries roughly 150,000 vehicles and pedestrians every day.” Or so says History.com. (http://www.history.com/topics/brooklyn-bridge.)

I find this to be very interesting. Here is some infrastructure that was built 135 years ago and is still in service. In fact, it could be said that based on its load and traffic, it is doing more now than it was doing 135 years ago when it was put in service. It cost $320 M in today’s dollars, but probably could not be built for fifty times that ($15 Billion) today. It was basically designed to last 100 years, but at 135 years it is still going strong.

Please note these facts. I will be getting back to them.

When it comes to selling infrastructure, there is one man that historically stands out, head and shoulders above all others: “George C. Parker (March 16, 1860 – 1936) was an American con man best known for his surprisingly successful attempts to “sell” the Brooklyn Bridge. He made his living conducting illegal sales of property he did not own, often New York’s public landmarks, to unwary immigrants. The Brooklyn Bridge was the subject of several of his transactions, predicated on the notion of the buyer controlling access to the bridge. Police removed several of his victims from the bridge as they tried to erect toll booths.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Parker.)

What this teaches us is that if you are going to sell infrastructure it is important to identify the proper customers.

What this also shows is that George was a man who was way ahead of his time. If he was selling infrastructure today he probably would be incredibly successful selling infrastructure to those that are actually in that business, and would not have to spend the last eight years of his life behind bars in Sing Sing prison.

It is also important to understand the engineering associated with some of the existing infrastructure (at least in the US, and probably elsewhere – look at the London Bridge for example), as people go around trying to make a case to replace it. The engineering associated with older infrastructure usually far and away exceeds the stress requirements that were to be placed on it. This probably cannot be said today. As costs have skyrocketed, engineers are now designing and building structures as close to the required loads and specifications as possible in order to keep those costs low. That means they also do not last.

In other words, in the past infrastructure was usually built to last. In addition to old bridges, think about all the pictures in magazines (and on the web) of the old copper pot stills being used at the various breweries (my personal favorite), and bourbon and scotch distilleries. I am sure that all the manufacturers of commercial distillery equipment would like to replace them, but I suspect that also isn’t going to happen any time soon.

Again, looking at our favorite infrastructure example: “(it employed) a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as was thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished or been replaced.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Bridge.)

For comparison sakes, a newer piece of infrastructure, the Tappan Zee bridge was put into service, in the same area, about 70 years after the Brooklyn bridge: “As another example, the original Tappan Zee Bridge was opened in 1955, and construction of its replacement is now underway. A 2009 New York state report on the original bridge described its design as “non-redundant,” meaning that one critical component failure could result in large-scale failure; the bridge was featured in a History Channel show entitled “The Crumbling of America.” The new bridge is being designed with a 100-year lifespan; info about the “New NY Bridge” is available” here. (http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/287844/Building+Construction/Lifespan+of+a+Bridge+Span.)

And there is also: “After years of dawdling while the bridge crumbled, state officials say they are rushing to complete a review of the most feasible solutions to the problem of the Tappan Zee. But a decision is still two years off and a new bridge would require eight additional years and as much as $14.5 billion to build, they say.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/nyregion/a-bridge-that-has-nowhere-left-to-go.html.)

“The bridge was built on a very tight budget of $81 million (1950 dollars), or $796 million in 2014 dollars.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tappan_Zee_Bridge.)

This would indicate that more recent infrastructure is usually neither designed to last as long as some of the older infrastructure, nor is it as reliable and cost effective as some of the older, over-engineered variety.

This would lead many to the position that for some of the older infrastructure, it would be much more economically feasible to repair it, upgrade it, maintain it, than it would be to replace it. This is despite what many of the current infrastructure suppliers might want or even indicate. If it is working and can still continue to work, why would anyone want to build another bridge, right next to the still working one, to carry the same traffic.

However, just because it was initially built well doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t or doesn’t need to be maintained. Infrastructure requires continued investment in order to maintain it: “The repairs, ordered quietly last October by the city’s Department of Transportation, are intended to fortify the concrete-reinforced steel-mesh panels beneath the bridge’s traffic lanes, which were found to be deteriorating by construction crews at work on a repaving project last July, officials said yesterday.….. the city’s Transportation Commissioner, attributed the problems to ”normal wear and tear” on the 115-year-old bridge…..He added that the steel girding and concrete that must be repaired, which were put in place during a 1954 repaving project, ”were installed with a life expectancy of 60 years,” and had therefore fulfilled most of their engineering mandate.” (http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/05/nyregion/as-concrete-falls-city-moves-to-fix-brooklyn-bridge.html.)

And of course, 20 years later more maintenance is needed on the Brooklyn bridge, only now, the cost is climbing: “The cost of repairing the Brooklyn Bridge is expected to hit $811 million — a roughly $200 million increase from estimates made only last year, The Post has learned. When the mammoth project to renovate the 133-year-old span began in 2010, the price tag was even lower — $508 million.” (http://nypost.com/2016/11/11/brooklyn-bridge-repairs-expected-to-cost-811m/.)

So, where does all this bridge information leave us when it comes to selling infrastructure?

I think the first thing to note is that unless the infrastructure is at risk of immediate failure, such as the Tappan Zee bridge is deemed to be, it is going to be very difficult to replace. You may be able to add to it. You may be able to augment it. But the financials usually do not make sense for a full replacement. It is going to be a tough sell to get a customer to buy something that does much the same as the thing it is trying to replace.

It also looks as though capacity is going to be the prime driver for infrastructure expansion and augmentation. The more cars that want to get across the river, the bigger the needed bridge, or the more bridges that are needed. New features and elegant designs of bridges are pretty cool, but the objective is to still get cars across the river as efficiently as possible. Form is nice, but it is function that predominantly drives infrastructure acquisition.

And I think finally, there is an excellent business to be had repairing, maintaining and improving the existing infrastructure. As we see above, even incredibly expensive bridge repairs are economically preferable to what would be the exorbitantly expensive cost of replacing the infrastructure. The Tappan Zee replacement bridge is expected to cost between $4 Billion and $15 Billion. The original Tappan Zee cast $81 Million. The financial math becomes pretty obvious, pretty quickly.

Focusing on how to improve the existing infrastructure, extend its life and help it to be used or run more efficiently are going to be keys to a customer first mentality that the good sales teams are going to need in order to be successful.

I think this is going to be especially important as customers are rapidly learning that the new infrastructure they buy today is not going to last as long as the old infrastructure they already have today.

If you don’t believe me, just look at the bridges.

Finance, Markets, Sales, Strategy

Why They Aren’t Buying

There are all sorts of allegories for sales. Hunting, farming, fishing, and a large list of others. They all seem somewhat out-doorsy and active (as opposed to passive – waiting for something to happen), but I think you get the point I’m making. Sales also seems to run in streaks. Some days it seems you can’t miss and all you need to say is “sign here, press hard for three copies”. And other days it doesn’t seem to matter what you do. You don’t seem to be able to close a door, let alone a deal.

We all like to think that it is superior salesmanship, or possibly a break-through product or technology advantage, when sales are good. We also like to point to inferior marketing and support, or a weak product offering when sales are not up to expectations.

When sales are not up to desired levels, it is usually left to management to blame poor salesmanship for the results, since both product technology and support are not readily changeable items in any short-term drive to improve sales.

I think the reality of sales booms and sales busts are more associated with those factors that either occur or evolve on a market wide basis. The deregulation of the mortgage industry led to an explosive growth in housing sales as people could then buy more house than they could normally afford, via balloon payment type and other exotic mortgages. This worked well until payments came due and real money was not available. The well documented housing bust and broader economic recession ensued.

Going a little further back into the end of the last century, was the telecom boom associated with deregulation. Companies suddenly found themselves with the opportunity to enter communications markets that they had previously been restricted from. This market attractiveness was further exacerbated by all equipment supplier’s willingness to lend these new companies the funds that they would need to by their equipment to enable access into these new markets.

This too worked well until the then new market was flooded with new competitors. The result was that there was not enough business to go around and no one had the real money needed to make their loan payments on their equipment. The well documented telecom bust then ensued as well.

In both of these examples, as well as many others across many other industries (banking, oil, etc), there were some very good times to be in sales, which were then followed by some very trying times to be in sales. It didn’t really matter what your individual effect on the sales process was.

I bring up these kind of market wide events not because I want to examine them, but because I want to exclude them from any discussion regarding why customers may, or more importantly may not be buying now. When various markets are thrown out of equilibrium by any number of market affecting legislative changes or other events, it seems that standard sales logic just doesn’t apply – usually to the eventual detriment of all involved.

I want to briefly look at why in a stable market, sales may not be achieving your desired goals.

I think that when you look at sales there are basically three aspects that need to be in place to be successful. Some may point to a multiplicity of other factors, but I think when you net them all out, you get back to these three basic ones.

The first is relationship. I know. This is trite. Relationship blah, blah, relationship. There is a reason everyone says it is important. That’s because it is. Do you trust the guy that sells you a car? No? That’s partly because you know that once he sells you a car, you are no longer his problem. You are the service department’s problem. He is probably not going to talk to you or try to sell you anything else for a while, unless you decide you need another car.

In the business to business sales world, most sales people cannot achieve their targets by simply selling something to a customer every three or four years. They have to face their customer continually. What they do after the sale is probably more important than what they do before the contract is signed. That is if they hope to get another sale.

That is how a relationship is built.

The second is the ability to solve a customer’s problem. It might be a problem they didn’t know they had. Faster, better, cheaper are always items that come to mind. Understanding what a customer wants to do as well as why they want to do it are keys here. It is in essence providing an answer to their question.

The third is providing the customer with the proper reason to buy your solution. This is usually known as a business case. If you are ten percent faster, but twice as expensive, is this acceptable? It’s hard to say at this point without more information. However, it’s a much easier decision if you are ten percent faster and the same price as a competitor.

Having a great relationship with your customer, and a great product are no longer enough. There must be a strong enough financial reason for a customer to buy. The customer must expect a sufficient return on the monies that they invest in a product in order to get them to spend those monies.

This customer return can take several forms. Does it reduce their costs of operations? Does it allow them to gain more customers? Does it allow them to get more revenue from their existing customers? And just as importantly, when does it allow them to recognize these returns. These are all very definable and quantifiable numbers.

If they are not, then in today’s business climate and environment, you may have an issue closing a sale. Quantification of customer value is rapidly becoming the key to sales success.

It should be noted that saving a dollar this year is far more preferable than potentially saving ten dollars, five years from now.

It seems that suppliers can get seduced by the elegance of their own technical solutions to their customer’s problems. They have a tendency to forget that just because what they are offering may be technically better than what the customers may currently have, that no longer means that a sale is assured. If the customer cannot identify the quantifiable benefit and returns associated with the proposed purchase, and when these returns can be expected, then the expectation should be of a difficult or delayed sales process.

Just because they trust you and what you are offering is better doesn’t mean they will buy it.

It appears that it is more and more about money, and more specifically today’s money when it comes to sales. Preparing for future opportunities, or addressing potential opportunities, or enabling future applications may no longer be a good enough reason for a customer to part with their limited amount of funds set aside for such expenditures. Customers are recognizing that if the sales discussion involves future benefits to them, then it also means that the actual purchase decision can probably be delayed to that future time when it coincides with those future benefits.

In today’s business environment, if companies are going to spend their money, they need to know what they are going to get in return. Not just the product or service that they are purchasing, but the quantification regarding what the purchased items will mean to their bottom line. How much of a reduction in costs. How many more customers. How much more will they be able to charge.

If today’s product will enable an as yet undefined application or future capability, then it is probably wise to assume that today’s customer may in fact wait to purchase that product until that future application or capability is defined and the market for and value of it can be quantified. Being bigger, better and faster for the sake of being prepared for the next big thing and the potential associated end user demands that go along with it, is probably no longer going to be a good enough reason to purchase.

If your customers aren’t buying, and there is no discernible, market wide issue causing a broader customer industry slowdown, then it is probably a good guess that the appropriate customer spend business case has not been made or met. As markets evolve to this technical solution – appropriate business case model, the solution price will remain a key aspect of every opportunity, but not so much from the aspect of how much a customer has to spend, but more from the point of view of how much the proposed solution must recoup in value for the customer, and as previously noted and just as importantly, how long it takes the customer to recoup it.

It is also possible that this lack of an appropriate specific return customer business case can turn out to be the broader customer industry slowdown, since all customers seem to be heading this direction. It can also depend on the relative competitive starting point for each customer in their respective markets.

It doesn’t seem that being bigger, better, faster or prepared for the next new thing will remain as good enough reasons for customers to buy. It appears that it will not be what the proposed customer solution operationally or technically does, but more what it financially does for the immediate benefit of the customer’s bottom line that will be the purchase decision criteria.

Activities, Finance, Focus, Goals, Process Management, Simplification

The Process – Simplicity Paradox

The known world is full of paradoxes. Paradoxi? Whatever. Having studied Physics in school I am somewhat familiar with a couple of scientific paradoxes that changed the way we look at everything. Prior to these changes the world was viewed through the lens of what was called Newtonian Physics. That is the mechanics of the motion of objects of non-zero size. Beach balls bouncing, planets orbiting, that sort of thing. It worked well until technology progressed to the point where people could examine smaller and smaller objects, like “particles”, electrons, and protons and such. Then it didn’t work anymore.

It was at this point in time that a new branch of Physics had to be created. It had to work for the macro-world of bouncing balls and the micro-world of sub-atomic nuclear particles. It was called “Quantum Mechanics”. It had to address the paradoxes that were now visible.

It had to address the paradox that sometimes light behaved as a wave and sometimes it behaved as a particle, when in reality it had to be both a particle and a wave all the time. If that was truly the case then everything had to exhibit the same characteristics of waves and particles. This is called the wave-particle duality.

There were other paradoxes that Quantum Mechanics had to address. The idea that physical quantities such as speed and energy (and others) changed in only discreet amounts, sort of like going up and down steps as opposed to the idea of smooth slopes like slides. It also had to explain why the very act of observing these things changed their behavior and made observing other aspects of the same objects that much more difficult.

So, as usually the question now is: What does this introduction have to do with anything associated with business. I think it is pretty simple. I think we have been working in a business management model that for analogy’s sake is the seventeenth century equivalent of Newtonian Physics. It has worked, or not worked as the case may be, on a somewhat macro-scale, but as we have tried to drive it further down on a micro-scale into the organization, it seems to no longer provide the solutions and value businesses need.

As we have introduced more process into the business system in order to try and drive more and more order into the system, I think we are starting to see a breakdown in the results we are expecting to see. Instead of getting better we have gotten slower. We don’t get the results that we expect. So what have we done? We have attempted to introduce still more and more process on a smaller and smaller level in order to achieve the predictability and order that we desire in our business universe.

I think we may have reached the same metaphorical boundary in business that Newtonian Mechanics Physicists had to cross in order to get to the new Quantum Mechanics model of the world.

As we layer in more and more process in order to try and simplify, streamline and make our business universe more predictable, we are also adding in more complexity to the business system through the application of the process itself. Herein lies the paradox: The very act of adding incremental process in order to simplify the business adds complexity to the business. We may actually end up simplifying the business a little, but it takes more effort in the process than we save in the business.

This incremental process complexity manifests itself in the time it takes to accomplish simple tasks. It can be seen in the number of conference calls that are now required before any actions can be taken. It can be seen in the increased desire for consensus instead of action. All of these complexity symptoms can be seen as the result of trying to drive the increased application of complex process into the business structures.

Extending the Quantum, Mechanical and Measurement metaphors a little farther into business could also give us some of the solutions to the paradoxes that business is now facing. If the very act of trying to simplify adds complexity, and if the very act of measuring modifies the behavior of how the business behaves, what do we need to change?

I think one of the first things we need to do is change what we measure. As we have seen in the quantum mechanical world, the more specifically we try to measure something the more we modify some of the targets other characteristics or attributes. This is actually called the “Uncertainty Principle” (It was actually introduced in the early part of the last century by the German Physicist Werner Heisenberg, and is also known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).

The same behavior is noted in organizations and is defined by the phrase “Expect what you inspect”. This generally means that by merely measuring something in an organization, whether it has value to the organization or not, you can change the behavior of the organization with respect to what you are measuring. If you measure the wrong things you should expect the wrong behaviors.

So perhaps we should reassess the value of ever more specific metrics and measurements. This thought seems to run almost entirely counter-intuitive to the directions that many organizations are going today. Instead of looking for ever finer and more specific things to measure we may want to take a step back and focus on the organization as a whole.

There are many metrics that the market looks at when it puts a value on the whole of a company, but the primary ones are financial: Orders, Sales, Profit, Earnings and Cash Flow. There may be others, but these should work for this argument’s sake. It is through the application of these metrics that the market usually establishes a value for the business. We might want to add Customer Satisfaction into the business metric mix, but I actually think that metric will sort itself out through the other financial metrics. If you don’t have Customer Satisfaction, or Quality or any of those derivative topics, you eventually won’t have the financials either as your customers will leave and take their business elsewhere.

So the simple baseline metric for every process, project, strategy, product or program should be: Is there a Financial Business Case that improves one of the five financial metrics that justifies the activity? By forcing the creation of that business case you have created the business representation in numbers and also the accompanying metrics for measuring the activity’s success. You can then see if the activity actually generated the beneficial behavior for the business that was targeted. If the value of the proposed activity cannot be defined, then there is a pretty good chance that the activity probably doesn’t need to be given a high priority.

Measurements against any other type of criteria will yield nothing more than some sort of a track against a non-critical objective, and will most probably drive a behavior that is not in alignment with the objectives of the business.

The Process versus simplicity paradox may be a little more difficult to counter, but again I think we can get it down to a business case. I think the idea for all those that would like to create, add to or extend a process is again to ask them to quantify what they are trying to correct or improve, and what resource they expect to expend on the improvement. In other words we need to create a Process – Simplification equation:

Man Hours required to implement the process
Less
Man Hours saved / removed from the business because of the process
Equal
Net Business Simplification.

The nice thing about physics is that it can be clearly expressed in terms of numbers. Postulates and theories can be readily proved or disproved via experimentation or observation. I think we need to look at returning business to this sort of practice as well. There is the proposed theory to reduce and align the metrics with the financial value metrics in the business so that all members of the organization are clearly working towards the same goals. This will make sure that the behaviors on the macro-organizational level are fully aligned to the individual or quantum level within the organization.

I believe and agree that some process is required for the proper running of an organization. The question is when do we start experiencing the law of decreasing returns when it comes to adding more process? By requiring at least a business case proposal and defense of the quantified value of each incremental process I think business can begin to regain the focus on the value that each process is supposed to deliver and start to move away from the current approach that appears to be more process as the solution to every issue.

Business like Physics is a numbers oriented discipline. Good processes in business are like good theorems in physics. People may like to believe in them, but they need to be proven out in the numbers and measurements before they become accepted as natural laws.

Accountability, Decision Making, Finance

Do The Math

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I can’t tell you how many times I have kept myself, my team or my business group out of trouble by doing something as basic as simple math. You know, adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. The sort of math that we were all supposed to learn starting in elementary school. It seems many of us think that we now have computers or other people who are responsible for this sort of activity. In just about every business that I have been in, it has always been brought home to me that knowing and understanding the numbers is everybody’s job. In almost every instance where this tenet has been forgotten or ignored, things have turned out badly.

I think part of the issue may stem from the fact that we don’t seem to use real numbers anymore. In the spirit of speed, or simplicity, or possibly laziness, we leave all the appropriate zeroes off of our numbers when we work with them for business. So now when we are working with say, twenty four million, six hundred thousand dollars (a reasonably large sum by just about any standards), instead of writing out $24,600,000 we put down $24.6 M. I know and you know they mean the same thing. However, I probably have $24.6 in my wallet. I know I don’t have $24,600,000.

Perhaps this trend has promoted a more relaxed attitude toward the numbers. Twenty four point six as opposed to twenty four point seven is only point one difference, right? It’s a rounding error. In reality its one hundred thousand dollars. How many more people could you hire or what more could you do if you had an extra hundred thousand dollar rounding error in your budget or in your wallet?

This example is just one of many possible reasons why people and businesses may have evolved this tendency toward what seems to be a more lackadaisical view of the numbers. There are probably many more. The point here is that the numbers and the math behind them represent the scoring system for the business game. It has been my experience that business eventually always boils down to the score.

In most other games you get to start tied with your opponent at zero and start counting upwards. The scoring only goes one way. Those that score the most usually win. The one exception that comes to mind here would be golf. It seems I never miss the opportunity to mention golf. In golf everyone starts at zero and starts counting and it is the one with the lowest score that wins. The point here is that you cannot do worse than zero. That is not the case in business. In business you can in fact end up with less than you started with.

This is called a “loss”, as in you have lost money.

Here in comes that math thing I mentioned at the start. Not only are there things that add positively to your score (this is called “Revenue”) unlike other games, in the business game there are things that can be and are subtracted from your score (this is called “Costs”). In sports you have a “loss” if your opponent ends up with a higher score than you. In business you end up with a loss if costs you more to provide your good or service than you get paid by customers for the good or service.

Here’s the kicker: the numbers don’t lie.

Bill Parcells, the famous football coach is credited with the following quote, when asked if his team was actually better than their record indicated. He said: “You are what your record indicates you are.” If you lost ten games and had a losing record that meant you were a ten game loser with a losing record. It didn’t matter how well you played. The numbers didn’t lie.

Any time you are looking for ways to improve your or your team’s performance, start with the numbers. Do the math. Look at the revenue (value) that you or the team generates or is responsible for. Don’t generalize regarding what you affect. Don’t try to take credit for associated work. Don’t claim “enablement” of someone else’s revenue. Be specific. Math is about specifics, not generalizations. Games have specific scores. Look at the costs you or your team generate as well. These are going to be the reductions to the score. You can’t hide them. They too must be figured into the score.

Leadership is about recognizing what needs to be done before it needs to be done.

Anyone can recognize that something needs to be done when the score indicates that the business is losing at the game. It is the leader who will have already done the math that will anticipate that something will need to be done. They will plan for it so that they can take full advantage of any potential opportunities and minimize and mitigate any potential risks.

The math is really pretty simple. If you want to change the business score there are basically two things you can do: Increase the positive score (revenue) or reduce the negative score (costs). Just about everything you can do to affect the business will fall into one of these two categories.

The usual seduction occurs when the manager focuses on only one or the other category. It is very difficult to grow an unprofitable business into a profitable one. Costs tend to grow along with the growth in revenue, hopefully at not the same rate, but they do grow. If you started out unprofitable and tried to grow without changing anything else, chances are you would still be unprofitable after any growth.

On the other hand it is impossible to cut costs all the way to prosperity. You can reduce costs to profitability (hopefully) but you cannot reduce your way to growth. However, a business left unchanged will continue on in the same direction, in the same manner that it has before. I have referred to this phenomenon in the past a business momentum. There have been too many instances in the past of managers not taking or delaying appropriate actions on the cost side in either the hope or expectation that something would change of its own accord.

It usually doesn’t and the score only gets worse.

It takes both the “pluses” and the “minuses” to change the score in a business. It takes looking at what has happened and using it to anticipate what will happen next. It takes the numbers. And if you are going to utilize the numbers you are going to have to do the math.

Investment firms have a wonderful disclaimer that states that past performance is no guarantee of future success. This is true. However in business it is a good indicator that without a change to the elements that make up that business’ scoring system on both the plus and the minus side of things, of what can be expected. When you start changing the factors that affect the score, you definitely need to first do the math.

Finance, Responsibility, Risk

Surprises

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As we enter the fourth quarter and approach the end of a year, greater attention will be focused on the business performance financials. We see this type of focus at the end of every quarter to a certain extent, but at the end of the year it peaks. Sales commissions and staff performance bonuses are paid based on annual numbers. Personnel ratings and reviews are conducted based on annual numbers. Business forecasts are to be completed in preparation for the next year during this time period as well. Predictability of business performance is now at a premium. It is also the time when businesses most try to avoid surprises.


 


Surprises are those unexpected events that materially affect both the performance and the measurement of the performance of the business. Surprises can be viewed as both positively impacting and negatively impacting to the company. However when surprises are viewed against the three basic limitations that all businesses must deal with, Resources, Money and Time, we see that at the end of the year, time is in very short supply when it comes to dealing with surprises. That means that incremental money and / or resources will be expended on surprises, both good and bad ones.


 


Good surprises usually come in the form of unexpected sales and revenue opportunities. A large un-forecasted order can come in. A product shipment scheduled for next year can be pulled forward into this year. Good surprises are normally associated with opportunities to increase the top line and via the financial flow through, increase the bottom line as well. However, even good surprises normally come with an additional cost. A large unexpected order will stress both the supply chain and production capabilities for delivery. Overtime and expedite costs may be required to meet the year end time frames. In short, because there is now limited time, it will take incremental resources and money to deal with even good surprises. No business leader wants to deal with problems, but if they are going to have problems, these are the types of problems that every business leader wants to deal with.


 


Bad surprises on the other hand are normally associated with issues that unexpectedly reduce sales or revenue, or alternatively increase business costs or expenses, and again via financial flows reduce the bottom line business performance. Expected orders being cancelled or not materializing would be the primary example of a top line bad surprise. A reduction in sales will turn into a reduction in revenue, and all other things being equal, a reduction in predicted earnings.


 


Top line bad surprises normally come about as a result of an overly optimistic sales team, or a sales team that is under engaged with the customer. Either way, it was not clearly known that the customer was not going to be buying, when everyone was predicting that they were. When the business is counting on the sale, the sales team needs to be fully engaged with the customer, as well as possibly a little conservative in their forecasting. It is far better to present the good surprise of an unexpected sale and the problems it presents than the bad surprise of the loss of a sale that was counted on to make the yearend forecast.


 


 Other types of bad surprises can affect both the top and bottom lines. Component shortages can cause unexpected production limitations precluding shipment and revenue recognition, changes to government regulations can add unexpected costs to products and unexpected legal or labor provisions can eat directly into margins to name just a few, are just a few examples of bad surprises.


 


The point here is that these surprises are issues that can and should have been readily identified as potential risks to the business. If they are risks, then the need a risk mitigation strategy if they occur. If they are not identified, then the business team needs to understand why they were missed and take corrective actions, as well as examine the business for any other unidentified potential risks. If they were identified and mitigation was neglected, then the business team must address this management failure appropriately as well in order to avoid future similar situations. Again in either event, it is the business leaders’ responsibility to identify and either avoid or mitigate these types of bad surprises.


 


Predictability of business performance is a key to the business’ success. As the end of the business year approaches it takes on a heightened importance. Good surprises can help bolster the numbers coming into the close of the year, but even good surprises usually come with the requirement of increased resources and financial costs since there is usually limited time to deal with them. Bad surprises on the other hand can cause problems with the business’ financial performance that there is not sufficient time for the business to recover from before the year ends. Bad surprises are normally the result of human error where either sales’ over optimism or management’s lack of attention to fundamental business practice has contributed to the business failure. In either instance the “surprise” needed to be identified well in advance of the event occurring so that the business could more accurately predict how it was going to perform.

Finance, Management, Sales

Know the Numbers and Sales

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Once I had attained executive level, I was frequently asked to conduct new hire orientation classes. I didn’t know if it was because no other executives wanted to do it or if it was because of the way I had come up through the ranks. Looking back I suspect it was because no one else would do it.


Regardless, I did take the responsibility seriously. At the end of the session, I would always ask for questions. The question I got most frequently was: “How did you become and executive so quickly, and what do we need to do to accomplish the same?” I came up with a two part answer. I think it still applies.


First I would tell people that they needed to spend some time in sales. It is hard to understand just how difficult it is to compete with other sales teams to get customers to give you money (orders) unless you have done it for a while. It will give you a perspective on the market from the inside out.


The second thing I would say is learn the numbers. As you progress up the corporate ladder, more and more of your communication and information revolves around the tabulated financial data. You have to understand how the metrics interrelate and how to affect them.


Doing this won’t guarantee your success in the corporate world, but it will help you to understand why it works and acts the way it does, and that is the first step to success.

Finance, Relationship, Sales

Involve Finance Early

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It seems too many times we end up asking our finance teams to total up the score for our businesses, after the fact. We make all our plans, execute them and modify them when they come in contact with reality. We move. We react. At the end of the month, the quarter or the year, finance tells us how we did.


This management structure breeds an adversarial relationship with finance, and casts them in the role of being the “money police”. The oversight check-and-balance needs to be there, but it needs to be there at the front end of the process. Finance needs to be an integral part of the planning process, the sales process and execution team from the beginning.


Understanding the financial ramifications of each move before you make it is critical. It will help avoid mistakes and missteps. It also builds finance into the team, instead of casting them in an external watch-dog role.


And the truth be known, finance would like to be involved earlier in the running of the business as well. Invariably finance is also compensated on the performance of the business as well, and they would like to have input into the process. Aligning your resources, either direct report or corporate finance, is key to creating a sound business team, and good business performance.