Category: Strategy

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Change Management Strategy

Empowering, not imposing – a lesson for hard times

Empowering people is hard. Imposing an opinion, solution or direction might seem like an easier way in hard times.

Spoiler alert: it’s not.

When you’re starting out a new role or a new project, or if you’re simply going through some changes in your professional or personal life, you’ll find yourself reacting with your lizard brain, the “thinking fast” one. That can get you out of trouble fast. But it can also create a lot more chaos than it was to begin with.

Reflections from a personal story

I was in a situation like that recently and I was fortunate enough to be able to reflect on it a few months after the dust settled. Mergers and acquisitions are hard. Integrations are where a lot of companies end up failing. There is also constant context for conflict and roadblocks for projects. For months, as a new hire, I was involved in integrating two brands. That meant meetings, not only to get to know people, but to build things with them from the get-go. We went from forming to storming really quickly and it was hard to see the clear path to norming and performing.

I saw people being in the way (and they weren’t), so I tried to push them out of the way (so they pushed back).

It’s not very empowering, is it?

That made my life and my goals much harder to achieve. It also didn’t benefit me or the team, or the larger company context altogether. I went into meetings with a clear outcome in mind, and tried to impose the best way forward. That prevented me from collaborating with everyone else in the room. It also took much more work from my side to get to a real solution, and move things forward.

I was missing an important piece: I didn’t consider what I didn’t know. I assumed I have enough information to formulate a clear conclusion about the future.

For me, it’s not natural to admit I don’t know something or that I need help. It’s something you’re taught to avoid while growing up as a man in Romania. You have to be strong and decisive, provide solutions fast, think on your feet at all times. After all, in school, in class, whenever we were asked a question, we had to answer on the spot or get punished. Not the most empowering environment. It also builds a “come up with any answer” mindset that’s not helpful later on.

Empowering: Stop and think

I recently learned a cool way to reframe this. Before making a major decision or change of direction, ask yourself:

“What are the implications of the things we haven’t considered?”

Let me unpack that a little bit.

First, you are already a step ahead by telling yourself that there are, in fact, things that you might not have considered.

Secondly, those things are likely to have implications in your projects/tasks/endeavors.

By spending a few more hours / days thinking about this question, you’ll be able to make better decisions and empower, not impose. You’ll have strong reasons for the way you are envisioning.

This way you’ll turn to empowering, and drop the impositions.

But this was recently, months after I had got through working on the big change project.

Turning imposing into empowering

Back to my personal story. What helped me turn around was asking myself: “Is what I’m doing right now helping the team succeed?”. If the answer was no, I would shut up and let others move on with their desired path. If it was yes, I would try to ask more questions. I would also be able to suggest other outcomes as I learned more about what I didn’t know.

Next time you feel like you want to grab people and show them the way forcefully, don’t. Choose your battles.

Think of it like you are across the field from them. Instead of trying to pull them to your original position, walk towards them ask them to walk towards you. Now you both have a slightly different perspective about the problem. Now you can try to see a shared path to the solution. Ask questions, listen and and walk with them to the shared solution. Just be careful to not walk too far in their direction and lose the way completely.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Categories
Life Strategy

Competitive people, choose your battles

Yes, you. I’m talking to you, the one that wants to win at everything. If it helps, I’ll admit I’m one, too, although this post is a way of toning down that overly competitive self that can drive to some pretty nasty consequences.

Communist catalysts

First, a little bit of background. I was born in (still) communist Romania, in 1987, from communist educated parents, and attended a fledgling post-communist school system. Our only goal was to get 10/10, and to get the first prize in class. My mom and my friends’ moms would always ask who got the highest marks on term papers, exams, tests and homework. If I didn’t get the highest, I’d get told off. If I got the highest mark, then they would ask who else got it, too.

I remember the only time I competed for marks by my own free will. It was when I bet with my parents that I would get a snowboard if I would get 10/10 in math over a whole semester. Obviously, they thought I wouldn’t do it, but I did and I’ve been snowboarding for over 15 years, as a result. Looking back, if they had given me similar milestones and if I had identified similar rewards, I would have been more involved in my first years of schooling.

Even childhood games were competitive, sports and any other stuff. I wrote about it earlier last year. This negative competitive attitude then went on to shape people, business and life. It creates bad work environments, bad relationships, bad friendships. It also takes a strong personal toll. If you have an internal conversation going on inside your head (I found out some people don’t, and that’s ok), even that can become competitive.

Manifestation

The way that manifested in mine for the longest of time was through comparing myself and my achievements with others. I know, slippery slope to depression and anxiety. It also fosters imposter syndrome and other nice side effects! If it’s not clear enough, I’ll spell it out: It’s really bad for you.

Naturally, I wanted to fix it. So here’s a few strategies I’ve been applying in work, life and sports.

Sports (for fun)

If you’re a competitive athlete, this obviously doesn’t apply to you – that’s more in the work section.

If you’re like me, and do sports for fun and casual work out, then hear me out. Up until last year, I was snowboarding and playing basketball like my life depended on it. While this was fun and I pushed myself to perform better, I often didn’t have as much fun. I was too focused on extracting every ounce of value or at beating my/others benchmarks. That took the fun out of my hobbies. Needless to say, when I stopped being competitive there, I started having way more fun.

At work

This is a tricky one. While in most situations, I would strongly encourage you to be competitive, there are different ways to approach this.

Not every battle is worth winning, and sometimes you need to give some ground in immediate battles to be able to get what you want long term. It’s like the long term greedy concept I talked a bit about in the fat cat/hungry wolf post.

So next time you’re in a work exchange of opposite views, ask yourself – do I need this win to achieve our collective long term goals, or will conceding here will buy me enough good will to get what I want/we need next time we have to negotiate? Good old fashioned politics, yes. While some people might hate it, it’s inevitable the higher up you move in your career.

Side-thread on politics – if you want to convince a large group of people to follow your lead, you’ll need to use some politics to do that. It’s as simple as finding the group leaders, the loudest people and the most likely to challenge you and working with them, not against them.

So while at work, choose your battles carefully. You might end up competing in a race that’s not yours.

Personal improvement

Here’s where I vote for going 100% competitive. Personal development is about yourself, and improving who you are every single day is a competition I love to be in.

Sure, there will be ups and downs, but overall, I’m ready to beat my previous results when it comes to being a better person, being inclusive, being kind to people, being generous and loving.

That doesn’t mean you have to beat yourself up about it. They way I see it, it’s like with my snowboard bet from high-school – you need to find that positive motivation that pushes you forward. I’ll share mine in a later post.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

Categories
Advertising Strategy

Your marketing is boring and it’s killing the business

It’s almost the end of 2019, and there are still a lot of marketers out there that are too afraid to pour some personality into their strategies. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones who created and made “corporate speak” a category.

It’s those who tweet or post on LinkedIn using language that the board or some lawyers reviewed first, so it ends up sounding like all things to all people, or like nothing at all, failing to commit to a storyline.

Sure, it de-risks the post and the company, but it also reduces the possibility of a standout, and in turn, long term success for the brand. That might make sense for a quarter to quarter focused team, but for those who want to play the 5-10-15 year game, it’s quite damaging.

Brands are a lot like people. They can be interesting or boring, on a sliding scale, with 00s of shades of grey. You know an interesting person when you see them – they stand out using a few simple traits – loud voice, strong facial expressions, specific clothes, specific/expert/passion topics they speak about, clear attitudes, strong beliefs. All those flavors define them and help them show their inner uniqueness. The boring one will be the polar opposite – low voice, no facial expression, traditional, conservative clothing, talks about the weather, their commute or some other mundane topic that’s low risk, equivocal attitudes, weak or no beliefs they hold/show.

Obviously, no one is 100% interesting or 100% boring. Sometimes we are both at the same time, depending on the audience. For example, when I speak about cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence or quantum computing around my wife, she tunes out, and tells me outright that I’m boring her and I should change the topic. When I do it with my Romanian IT group, people listen and engage with me on those topics, and soon 2 hours pass without changing the subject.

Interesting people, like interesting brands, are deeply interesting to their target audience and uninteresting to the rest. It keeps the conversation clean – only the ones who care should engage with you and your brand. The rest are time wasters, better have them focus their time and energy elsewhere.

There’s tons of literature out there about how to best do this as a marketer, so I won’t get into that. The problem is not reading it, but putting it into practice, especially in an organization that is inherently risk averse and there are non-marketing gatekeepers on how the brand should materialize externally.

As marketers, we need to let go of our fear of being too out there, too forward or too bold. That fear is what keeps us from being interesting, same as in our personal lives. Sure, there will be people who don’t like the message. Sure, you will make mistakes along the way, and some may argue that this is a sure way to get fired. Not letting go of the fear is the best way to get fired, and not just from the company, but from the entire industry and practice.

Boring marketers have a special place in the world, and that’s not on any top or podium, but in the “looking for a career change category”.

Photo by Faris Mohammed on Unsplash

Categories
Business Models Startups Strategy

Robinhood Cash Management – daily tap, tap, go program

I don’t usually post about referral programs, but this one has to be the best I’ve seen in a while. Remember those early mobile games where to you had to frantically tap your screen to get more points or win the game? Guess what, product managers and UX designers at Robinhood did, too.

They launched the Cash management waitlist where you tap to go up in line. You can only tap for about 1,000 times per day, it seems. Pretty crazy, right?

Here’s what they did.

They launched Cash management, an added feature to Robinhood Financial LLC brokerage accounts. The Annual Percentage Yield (APY) paid by Sutton Bank is 2.05% as of October 8, 2019, and can be changed at any time. If you’re interested, use my signup link and we’ll both get rewarded.

Previously, they tried this thing before with savings accounts, but regulators shut them down, since they didn’t ask for approval beforehand. Hopefully this time it’s more legit!

Don’t forget to tap daily after you sign up!

Categories
Startups Strategy Venture Capital

Take the meeting after doing due diligence for VC expertise

I wrote an extensive article on how to choose the right VC as a founder after a few very direct and intense experiences and significant research. Recently, I have been advising a few founders and one of the most important topic they bring up is raising money. They have to go out and talk to VCs all the time, if they want their startups to grow. Sure, they could build and scale organically, and kudos to the ones that do, but for deep tech, more often than not, you need deep investments.

The first rule of VC meetings as a founder should be: don’t meet everyone who wants to meet with you. It’s the same as reaching out to VCs, not all of them will want to talk to you. And that’s ok.

Let’s say you are in the fortunate position where VCs reach out to you and ask for meetings. This is the way I would structure the due diligence process from the founder/CEO perspective:

  • Does the VC have experience investing in the market(s) I’m building for or with customers I want to have?
  • Does the VC have successful exists or meaningful M&A activity?
  • Does the VC have partners that have specific, hands-on industry knowledge that can benefit my business? (n.b. hands-on can mean operator, but it can mean a good track record as a VC in that space)
  • If you are deep tech, does the VC have deep technical expertise – like for NLP, blockchain, biotech, self-driving cars, manufacturing etc.
  • Is the person who reached out / who I’m supposed to be meeting the right person in the VC to meet?
  • Does that person have deep experience in my space – industry and technology?
  • Do they agree to take a 15-30 min phone call to discuss their questions?
  • Do they ask the right questions during that call that reflect industry and tech expertise?

If even one of these is a no, then you would be better off passing the call. They might be fishing in the wrong pond or just gathering market intelligence. It won’t likely lead to you getting investment from them.

If this is useful, please share with your founder peers.

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Categories
Startups Strategy

Artificial Intelligence – the Hottest Topic of 2017

ai20172017 has just started and already there’s a lot of voices in the market placing Artificial Intelligence at the top of predictions and reports from Forrester Research, Gartner, Tractica and venture capitalists alike.

In one GeekWire piece, three of the five venture capitalists quoted about 2017 trends mentioned AI on their list. That’s remarkable for an industry that has not yet reached maturity but has demonstrated it is ready for widespread adoption. 2017 is likely to be the year we see significant uptake in practical applications for artificial intelligence.

We are after all in a perfect storm of data, computing power and algorithms that fuel these applications both at startup and at corporate level. And I’m not talking about the all knowing AI, but something way more practical:

The promise of artificial intelligence is ubiquitous and often portrayed in Hollywood as a calculating robo-nemesis, disguised as a friend or personal assistant (just see Her, exMachina, and Westworld). Yet, there are few areas better suited for an AI-powered transformation than enterprise & business functions.

Mikhail Naumov, President & CSO at DigitalGenius – Human+AI Customer Service

As a bonus, Udemy is offering their AI/ML course at a 95% discount, an easy way to get in on the machine learning growth wave.

Categories
Startups Strategy

3 MUST Focus Areas for Growth Managers

There is an increasing amount of noise out there about what a growth hacker or a growth manager (please don’t confuse these two!) should do to drive 10x growth in organizations. I’ve seen a lot of tactical suggestions, examples and strategies, ranging from PPC, A/B testing, to branding and sales organization setup, but very few talk about the WHYs, the reasons behind all the tests and the activities, the larger picture, the strategic intent. Sure, you can argue that it could be all for growth.

startup-photos

Growth for growth’s sake is not sustainable and is a bigger danger to a company than not having growth in the first place!

Here’s my take on it. Every Growth Manager who is building a sustainable oranization must focus on the following 3 elements:

  1. Product Marketing
  2. Business Development
  3. Investors & Other Key Stakeholders

1. Product Marketing

The Growth Manager needs to understand the customer and be able to work with the product & sales teams to develop benefit statements and compelling stories.

They own the message, the brand and the marketing strategies, channels and budgets and are responsible for lead generation, PR, thought leadership, influencer relationships and all other brand building activities. They own the paid, earned , owned media mix and drive brand awareness both industry-wide and to customer segments.

Here’s a very good definition given by Openview Partners:

Product Marketing also focuses on understanding the market and market needs, but with an emphasis on understanding the buyer of the company’s products and services. Product Marketing is responsible for developing positioning, messaging, competitive differentiation, and enabling the Sales and Marketing teams to ensure they are aligned and work efficiently to generate and close opportunities.

Deliverables: Product Marketing Strategy, Marketing Assets (website, branding, PR, messaging), Marketing Campaigns

2. Business Development

If a Growth Manager focuses on just the first point, then they are effectively a Product Marketing Manager. However, given the moment a growth manager joins the organization, they are required to step up and step in the business development process, as well as the marketing process.

That way, they learn two important things – first hand customer feedback on product marketing messages and materials that sales teams need in order to be successful. The feedback is very useful in refining and iterating on product benefits, narrative, angle, story, case studies, customer success showcases.

The materials needs assessment feeds into creation of product sheets, pitch decks, videos, websites, communication campaigns, email marketing, automation flows, lead nurture campaigns – any activity that the sales team needs “air support” for in the process of moving leads down the funnel to opportunities and active customers.

Deliverables: Business Development Strategy, Sales Funnel, Sales Pipeline Management, Sales & Marketing Collateral (white papers, product sheets, videos, presentations, nurture campaigns)

3. Investors & Other Key Stakeholders

To ensure healthy and sustainable growth, the last piece of the Growth Manager puzzle is resource & stakeholder management. They must always think two steps ahead of the game, making sure the team is ready to raise the next round, ready to bring in the right people to expand the team and ready to present itself in front of customers.

Growth Managers need to figure out how the company should look like, what it needs to become, in order to grow into that picture piece by piece. It can be the way the branding is portrayed, the way the website is designed and structured, the way you handle recruitment & employer branding and how all of these are externally perceived by stakeholders other than customers – i.e. investors, partners, future employees, peers.

Deliverables: Marketing Collateral, Investor Relations Collateral (decks, website, marketing and sales assets), Employer Branding Strategy & Collateral

If you are a Growth Manager today or planning to become one, you must keep your actions focused on all three of the elements to ensure consistent, sustainable results delivery. Hey, one day you could be the CEO of the company.

Categories
Digital Tips Startups Strategy

When do you need a Growth Manager?

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expansion

I won’t quote the Harvard Business Review article that decisively said that every company needs a growth manager because I think that’s a wrong approach. Only businesses that have a strategic goal to grow need a growth manager, all others need a manager that can maintain the status quo, the market share, the profit margin, the shareholder returns a.s.o. The latter companies will suffer from having a Growth Manager as will the Growth Manager suffer from being in such companies, because growth does not come without pains or changes.

If you don’t leave room for some pain in order to grow towards the reward, you will never get to the reward.

Another article I’d like to mention here is the Intercom piece about the bullshit that is growth hacking and how bad it is for an organization to turn it into a strategy. Sure, it’s scrappy, lean, works for a while, but the price you pay in the long run is a lack of foundation for the growth you hacked your way into. That foundation is done with investment in tools, strategies, deliverables, templates, methods, people, offices that don’t deliver right away. Hell, they may even push your organization at the very edge, stretching the runways, cash flows and giving the C-levels some nightmares. But the ones who choose to grow this way are the most likely to reap the rewards in the long run.

One of the best places and times to hire a Growth Manager is when the company is opening up a new office in a new geography. The founder / C-level / co-founder that is in charge of opening this new office should first hire the growth manager to essentially build infrastructure for operations, sales, recruitment and marketing and benefit from their network and expertise, especially regarding process design and management. Without this person to drive the new office growth, the pace will be significantly decreased due to the lack of bandwidth of the person opening the office alone.

It’s here that the redundancy rule stands very strong – have at least two people in the company with overlapping skills, that way if one gets hit by a bus or goes on vacation, the other can keep running the shop.

Hire a Growth Manager that is curious, hungry, that has built at least several other projects, managed business units or functions from zero to regional if not global impact. Give them resources and freedom to act, trust them to build the infrastructure which will enable the product-market fit startup to grow, the established company to expand and the team to specialize and move from a learning – jack of all trades type of roles to production focused, quota focused, ROI, KPI focused machines that will deliver the results for your next round or the IPO or the results you will need 3-4 quarters from now.

Remember, it’s not just about the 10x growth requirement or the go-to-market readiness that needs a Growth Manager. The best companies hire one before that so he/she will have time and resources to build the vehicles to be used in the future growth process.

Categories
Digital Tips Strategy

SEO doesn’t work without branding

Even though TechCrunch now has gone tabloid, they still nail it from time to time. This week, I was reading an article on how the digital marketers decided to skip school, reinvent the wheel and discount all strategic management tools to go directly to instant gratification tactics and/or hacks.

My fight to pick right now is with the SEO. It doesn’t matter if you have a good SEO ranking if you are an unknown brand. As a corollary, SEO strategies are not effective in building brands if they focus solely on the SEO factor and not on the mix of PR & branding impact.

Just look at the A(wareness) I(nterest) D(esire) A(ction) model, a simple tool from the corporate marketing world. I, as a potential customer for your product, need to be first aware of it, then be interested in it, then desire it, in order to click and buy. If I’m not quite there, then what I will do is click to see if I’m interested, if I desire and then maybe buy. But the SEO article has to deliver, in this case, interest and desire, which, sadly, not many of them do. This is because the SEO people rarely work together with the PR people and they just run bland content, which doesn’t incite much interest, let alone desire. They focus more on action and on the link juice and that’s where they lose points.

The right way to do it is to link the PR, content marketing & overall branding strategy with the SEO by placing articles that are engaging, interesting, exciting and brand aligned on SEO properties to generate conversations, shares, social proof alongside the ranking increase. Hey, in the end, all those social signals end up actually boosting SEO.

So stop being boring, work with PR people and look beyond the DA/PA/other metrics you might be using.

old-seo-new-seo

Photo taken from the Relevance Agency website

Categories
Strategy

You can’t capture micro-moments just like that

Recently read about Google’s VP of Marketing saying that the advertising game is “no longer about reach and frequency”, but about capturing micro-moments. While the micro-moment focus is not news coming from Google, they’ve been at it for a while, the real deal here is the fact that a VP of Marketing is suggesting to drop demographics and identity to focus on immediacy and intent.

The author citing the Google rep tries to steer away from just micro-moments, suggesting to match customer data with context, but that’s still not enough. Let’s think about a use case:

Imagine you are searching for something you need, like money transfers or a sim card company for calling abroad.

Is it enough to stumble onto an ad?

What if that keyword group or market is saturated by competition and you see 10-15 different ads in a search result page?

How do you make up your mind which ones to click?

Then how do you make up your mind which ones to buy?

The short answer is that we don’t know for sure. But experience, past results and methodologies show that one person buying a product or service will go through several stages until they purchase. That’s AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action), in this example. A customer is unlikely to take action if they aren’t aware, interested or desire your product or service and to desire, they must first be interested and to be interested they must first become aware. While you can short-circuit the model with Adwords, you can do it only if the perceived risk is lower than the promised reward and that’s difficult to assess if there is no awareness of your brand, product or service.

To build that awareness -> interest -> desire flow of customers, you want to look at demographics, reach and frequency of interaction with your multichannel touch points – that’s PR, events, offline branding, content marketing, emails, search ads, display ads, social media, endorsers, referrals, reviews. This mix becomes critical when you have a trust barrier to overcome, like in financial services or healthcare, for example, where the lack of delivery is financially or physically painful. In that case, Adwords alone cannot do the job. I like to compare its impact to that of the weapons in the case of the hunter and the hounds.

The hunter can only shoot the prey which is her weapon range, so she has to spend a lot of energy going out and finding the herds of deer. There are others out there too, so she might find herself heading to the pack and shoot or scare the prey. So her best bet is to bring in hounds to find and steer the prey in her direction. That way, she doesn’t have to waste time and energy going towards packs or shooting from afar, with little chance of success, but rather have deers come to her, cased by the hounds, and making single sure shots.

Chasse_a_courre

Image credits: wikimedia.org

But what are the right hounds (channels) to go for? How do you choose them? That’s where the narrative, strategy, product USPs and experiments come in.