Boosting Sales for Beginners

by Paul Williams

Ah... "Drive Sales." Is there a company that doesn't have 'sales driving' as a key strategy?


It can't be much simpler than a choice of three levers.

1. Find New Customers
   
   • Create a New Market with a new product or service, or
     
   • Go deeper with your existing targets
   
   
2. Increase Frequency - Get existing customers to use your business more often.


3. Increase Average Ticket - Get existing customers to spend more when they use your business.

While simple doesn't mean easy. It helps to know that these are your three launching points.

When choosing one - or perhaps all three - of these strategies. The next step is to ask "How?"

• How can I find new customers?
  
• How can I get existing customers to come more often?
  
• How can I get them to buy more?

From these base questions will branch new, potential solutions.


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Paul Williams is a professional problem solver at Idea Sandbox. He can help you create remarkable ideas to grow your business. You may read more at his website and find him Twittering as @IdeaSandbox.

Power of Incomplete Microstories

by Matthew E May

If you follow this blog you know I'm a huge fan of "I Wrote this for You." (Iain Thomas contributed a piece for this blog here.) Here's Iain talking at a recent TEDx event is South Africa. It's a heartwarming story about the power of story. It's a must-see, if you want to change the world. And even if you don't.





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Matthew E. May is the author of "IN PURSUIT OF ELEGANCE: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing." He is constantly searching for creative ideas and innovative solutions that are 'elegant' - a unique and elusive combination of unusual simplicity and surprising power.

Simplifying the Complex

by Paul Williams

Some call it a matrix, others a two-by-two diagram. I call them awesome.

Two-by-twos allow you to plot complex information in a matter that allows you not only to see the relationship between two things, but also to make better judgments and decisions. I often use these during brainstorming sessions with clients as a way to filter our stacks of great ideas to the fewer, bigger, and better solutions.

How to Use Them

1. Determine the two important qualities you want to use to measure or filter your ideas.

For example: We want to better understand the relationship between employee sales and their customer service scores. This two-by-two would begin something like this:



2. Next, I'll plot where each team member according to both their sales and their service score.



We can see Julia ranks where we hope all of our employees would be - she is making high sales and earning a high customer service score.

We can also use two-by-twos as a diagnostic tool to understand where adjustments are needed. Looking at the diagram, we can see that Winston needs help with customer service. O'Brien needs both sales and service help.



You can plot anything. Other measures you may find helpful include:

Product Measurement
Which products are profitable to which customers?
PLOT: Product Profitability -and- Customer Type

Customer Service
Which aspects of our service needs to be worked on?
PLOT: Degree of Importance to Customer -and- Satisfaction Levels

Television Ads Ranking
Which commercials are connecting with customers?
PLOT: How Memorable -and- Relevance

Marketing Promotion Logistics
Which marketing promotion is easiest to implement?
PLOT: Ease of Implementation -and- Investment

Innovation Gauge
Let's prioritize our innovative ideas.
PLOT: Remarkability of Idea -and- Difficulty to Implement

Two-by-twos are simple, effective, and versatile - they make it possible to plot nearly anything. Give them a try!

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Paul Williams is a professional problem solver at Idea Sandbox. He can help you create remarkable ideas to grow your business. You may read more at his website and find him Twittering as @IdeaSandbox.

Keeping it Simple

by Mike Myatt

One of the most effective ways to order your world is to simplify everything you encounter. However the problem is that keeping it simple often becomes very difficult when our basic human nature is to over-complicate everything we touch. In thinking about the people I respect the most, to the one, they possess the uncanny ability to take the most complicated of issues and simplify them. You will find that the best leaders, communicators, teachers, and innovators have a true knack for taking extremely complex, dense or intricate content and making it engaging and easy to understand. In fact, it was Leonardo Da Vinci who said:


"Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication."


In today's post I'll take a look at the often overlooked benefits of keeping it simple.

While simplicity may have become a lost art, understanding the importance of simplicity is nonetheless critical to your success in business. Consider all the presentations/meetings you've attended in the last few weeks. Was it the people who were able to articulate their positions in a simple and straight forward fashion, or the individuals that made things complex and tedious that got traction with their ideas?

It has been my experience that the more complicated, difficult, or convoluted an explanation is, that one or both of the following issues are at play: 1) the person speaking is a horrible communicator, or; 2) the person speaking really doesn't possess a true command of their subject matter. It is one thing to toss around the latest buzz-words or to have the most complex flow chart, but it is quite another thing to actually possess such a deep and thorough understanding of your topic that you can make even the most complex issues easy to understand.

It is almost as if business people have come to believe that complexity is synonymous with sophistication and savvy. It has been my experience that the only things that "complexity" is synonymous with are increased costs and failed implementations. There is an old saying in the software development world that states "usability drives adoptability" which tends to lend support to my observations. Those of you that know me have come to understand that I prefer to cut to the chase and get to the root of an issue as quickly as possible...this requires the ability to simplify, not complicate matters.

The truth is that simplifying something doesn't make it a trite or incomplete endeavor. Rather simplification makes for a more productive and efficient effort that is often more savvy than other more complex alternatives. As an example I'll use the area of design to prove my point. I can think of no better representation of simplicity at work than the iPod. Apple took something complex, sophisticated, and feature rich and crushed the competition by making it simple. The simplicity of the iPod is exactly what makes for a great user experience. Absolutely nothing is lost in the iPod's simplicity, and it is in fact the simplicity itself which makes it so classically elegant.

Another benefit of simplicity is that it serves as a key driver of focus, which enables greater efficiency, productivity, and better overall achievement. Keeping things simple allows you to focus on one thing at a time without the distractions that complexity by its nature breeds. I would suggest that you break down every key area of your business (operations, administration, marketing, branding, sales, finance, IT, etc.) and attempt to simplify your processes, initiatives, and offerings.

As a C-level executive you must focus on simplifying your day in order to maximize your efficiency. By simplifying everything from the information and reports you view, to your communications protocol, to your agenda, to your decisioning structure, you will be better able to operate in today's unnecessarily complex world.

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Mike Myatt, is a Top CEO Coach, author of "Leadership Matters...The CEO Survival Manual", and Managing Director of N2Growth.

Simple Innovation

by Stephen Shapiro

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of "The Little Prince", once said:


"Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away."


This is a brilliant quote because it describes the challenge many innovators face. Too often, new products are overly complex and end up 'over-serving' their customers.

My new computer with Vista and Office 2007 is a perfect example of that. 99% of the software's functionality goes unused, yet these complexities slow down my computer and reduce ease of use. Being able to do everything for everyone is not perfection.

Next time you are designing a process, a product, or a service, ask yourself, "What can I remove?" For most consumers, simplicity is more important than comprehensiveness (and complexity).

The concept of 'taking away' is also a great time management technique. In addition to your to do list, be sure to create a 'don't do' list. Become masterful at killing products, eliminating non-value adding tasks, and removing old/pointless habits.

Or, as Michelangelo once said:


"In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it."


What are you doing that is imprisoning your perfection?

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Stephen Shapiro is the author of three books, a popular innovation speaker, and is the Chief Innovation Evangelist for Innocentive, the leader in Open Innovation.