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Monthly Archive for May, 2009

Spring top tips for your business

Published by Business Link on 14 May, 2009 in Top Tips • 0 Comments

Briefing salespeople on your customer value proposition

Do your salespeople and customer-facing employees know your customer value proposition? That is, the key values and benefits your customers obtain when purchasing your products or services. Ensuring your people articulate your value proposition effectively can help customers better engage with your offerings.

Playing with pricing

In a recession you may be tempted to reduce prices to stimulate demand. This may be an effective short to mid term strategy, but consider the long-term impact to make sure you avoid permanently devaluing your products or services. Consider temporary alternatives such as introductory offers, loyalty discounts, limited-time special offers or bulk buy discounts.

New media – finding a fit

Think about new media such as blogs, micro-blogging social networks or podcasts. Now think about the content you might transmit using such media. Do you have something valuable to say to customers? Can you provide useful, high-quality content? Ultimately any medium is only effective if the content is relevant to or valued by the customer. Find a fit between content and medium and you have found great opportunities in new media.

How to remember things

An Ashridge Journal report offers tips to remember on remembering things. The authors of “Make your MARC in business: Memory techniques”, say that short-term memory typically lasts 15 seconds, during which time you should repeat to yourself the information you have just learned, such as someone’s name. To retain in long term memory, ask questions of what you have learned, such as “why do I need to know this?” and “what will I gain from remembering this?”; such reasoning helps long-term memory retention, the authors suggest.

Power manage computers to save energy

The simplest energy saving tips are sometimes the most overlooked. Is your computer’s power management set up correctly so that the screen turns off and/or the computer goes to sleep when not in use? It takes just a few mouse clicks to set up, and a few more to set up all the computers in your office. Quick carbon cutting, quick cost savings.

Does your website comply with accessibility regulations?

Website providers have a legal duty to provide web content that is accessible to disabled individuals. For example, designers should ensure images carry ‘alt’ tags which describe the contents of the image. You can check your website’s accessibility using free tools. Check ‘Accessibility issues‘ for more info and links.

What’s your plan-B?

What if you lose ten per cent of your sales revenue during the next six months? What if you are forced to drop prices to maintain demand? What if your bank recalls their overdraft? Ask what if, and what contingencies you can put in place to maintain financial stability.

Download Top Tips

It’s good to talk

Published by Business Link on 14 May, 2009 in HR & People Development • 0 Comments

Good employee communication and consultation can improve performance in numerous ways. Firstly, open dialogue strengthens top-down management, ensuring that information and instructions are well-received and understood by employees. Such clarity of communication also improves employee motivation and productivity, by ensuring employees understand their responsibilities and how their roles are important to the organisation.

Of equal importance is the fact that good employee communications and consultation can open up channels through which knowledge and ideas can reach and inform decision makers. This intelligence can significantly improve the quality of leadership and decision making, and spur innovation. By listening as well as talking, business leaders can improve their situational awareness, become more informed, and thus make better decisions. An inclusive approach can also improve employee involvement, motivation and productivity.

Effective communication and consultation is also valuable during times of change, such as redundancy, business growth or recession. Open dialogue ensures that employees feel part of the change process, and provides them with a chance to influence it. Often people react more positively to change if they are involved in the process.

It is useful to appreciate the difference between communication and consultation. As employee relations expert ACAS puts it, communication is “concerned with the interchange of information and ideas” whereas consultation “goes beyond this and involves managers actively seeking and then taking account of the views of employees before making a decision”. In a practical context, communication could be described as an organic and informal process, in contrast to the formal and systematic approach of consultation. Improving both distinct approaches is therefore important.

According to ACAS, a management-led communications and consultation policy represents a “particularly effective way of setting out the attitude of the organisation, defining the responsibilities of those involved in the process and setting out the means of communication and consultation that will be used”. In other words, business leaders must encourage open dialogue by setting objectives, assigning responsibilities and defining specific methods of communication and consultation.

There are many specific methods of communication and consultation to choose from. Face-to-face meetings can be effective, either on a one-to-one or group basis. And written approaches can be equally useful, ranging from anonymous feedback to email or open online collaborative discussions. As mentioned, communication may occur naturally without the need for rigid processes, whereas formal consultation might require more systematic approaches. In certain circumstances companies are legally required to inform and consult employees, and businesses with over 50 employees are legally required to undergo formal consultation via a forum containing representatives from the employee base.

Driven by the benefits, business leaders should aim to improve both informal and informal methods of communication and consultation. In doing so they can improve the clarity and authority of their leadership, improve their awareness and thus make better-informed decisions, and foster a more involved, motivated and productive workforce.

More info – Inform and consult your employees

More info – Working with employee representatives

More info – Regulations on consulting employees with 50+ employees

Bad leadership

Published by Business Link on 14 May, 2009 in Management & Leadership • 0 Comments

“Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth”, according to one authority on the subject. Most observed because many of us wish to become better leaders. Least understood because conclusively defining the qualities a leader must exhibit is not an easy task. If anything, observations from the past teach us that the greatest leaders tend to show wildly diverse traits and characteristics.

Regardless, experts have distilled a number of core qualities said to aid good leadership. From his observations on the subject, leadership author Warren Bennis remarks that successful business leaders of the past “paid attention to what was going on, determined what part of the events at hand would be important for the future of the organisation, set a new direction, and concentrated the attention of everyone in the organisation on it”. In essence, Bennis argues that successful business leaders possess stellar awareness, show astute judgement and vision, and are able to inspire or demand the focus of their people.

So, let’s take Bennis’ qualities of good leadership and imagine a business led by those who lack such traits.

This imaginary business would first and foremost be ignorant. Without an in-depth awareness of what is going on, either inside or outside of the organisation, the business would be unable to see or react to the issues, problems, challenges or opportunities that it faces. Through blind ignorance the business would quickly suffer. Internally the business would fail to progress on many levels; for example, it would be unable to identify correct training needs, tackle operational inefficiencies, or pursue key innovation objectives required to improve its product or service offerings. Externally the business would fail to quickly and properly react to changing environmental circumstances, such as the numerous effects of the recession, or the impact of changing competitor behaviour, and so on. In short, the business would be ignorant of the very things it needs to know.

As a consequence of this ignorance the business would lack judgement, and thus have a hard time setting its direction and defining its vision. Business leaders – ill-informed to what is going on – would have little choice but to set their direction and vision based on guesswork. While it is true that visceral instinct plays a part in leadership, such judgement-calls are usually based on some level of underlying intelligence and awareness. Without such knowledge the business would be pushed forward in a dangerously ill-conceived direction.

At this point the business’s leaders must attempt to focus minds onto following their direction and realising their vision. They must, in essence, ask people to follow a plan born from ignorance and poor judgement. And of course, many of their followers are likely to have a deeper awareness of what is going on than the leaders themselves. So, rather predictably, those being led are left frustrated, demotivated and unwilling to follow a direction so ill-conceived. Ultimately this dynamic creates a tussle between top and bottom so damaging that the leaders lose credibility, everyone else loses inspiration and commitment, and the business loses direction.

Harsh words – but our intentions are merely to illustrate the effects of poor leadership so that leaders can be wise to such traps and ultimately improve. Bennis’ traits of good leadership are qualities which can be taught; in the coming months we hope to delve deeper into the question of how leaders can improve, so stay tuned.

More info – Lead and motivate your staff

More info – Upskilling your workforce access a grant of up to £1,000

Invoicing

Published by Business Link on 14 May, 2009 in Finance • 0 Comments

Take a look at our three guides to help you review your invoice terms and prevent or recover late payments.

Review invoice terms

Make sure invoices include the right information as required by law. Also review your terms and conditions to ensure you clearly set out pertinent details such as payment terms, credit limits, or your right to charge interest on late payments. Obtain explicit customer agreement of your terms and conditions.

Are your payment terms too flexible? Commonly used terms range from payment upon delivery to seven to thirty days, or longer. Tightening terms can improve cashflow, but remember, credit can be a valued customer benefit; in such cases it is important to strike a balance between your needs and your customers’.

More info – Invoicing and payment terms

Preventing late payment

Getting your terms and conditions in order and obtaining customer agreement are key steps for preventing late payment. If your customers agree to specific terms, they might feel less inclined to break them.

To lower the risk of late payment you may wish to run credit checks on all customers, or on specific customers where you are wary of their ability to pay. If credit checks are unsatisfactory, tighten your invoice terms.

Quickly issue invoices. Prompt invoicing reduces the total time you are awaiting payment, and signifies that you are professional in your approach to invoicing and thus you expect a similar courtesy from your customers. Issuing friendly and timely invoice reminders could also help to prevent accidental late payment.

More info – Preventing late payment

Recovering late payments

Strong communication is often the most effective start to late payment recovery. Be professional, fair and firm. Find out why payment is late and when your customer expects to pay. Sometimes you might choose to offer flexibility, but do this on your own terms and ensure a payment deadline is agreed. If necessary, remind customers of your terms and conditions, and that you may decide to charge interest on late payments.

You have a statutory right to charge interest on late payment of invoices. Such a course of action could deter further delays, or represent a means of compensating you for the inconvenience and costs of late payments.

You may ultimately need to pursue legal action. Make sure you have a plan of action in place should the need arise, so that you can act decisively, quickly and effectively.

More info – Recovering late payments / Tool – Calculate the interest due on an unpaid debt

Process innovation

Published by Business Link on 14 May, 2009 in Creative • 0 Comments

In 1928 the world’s first sliced loaf went on sale, advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped”. The catch – sliced bread was itself difficult to wrap. After experimenting with rubber bands and metal pins, a baker solved this problem by using a cardboard tray which kept the slices together so that automated wrapping machines could function. It was the greatest thing since sliced bread!

This story provides a great example of the value and accessibility of process innovation. Minor improvements to processes can bring about significant gains in productivity, quality and reliability. And perhaps more importantly, process innovation is achievable by anyone, from baker to biochemist; unlike grandiose product inventions or technological innovations which require significant investment, research and development, a process improvement can be achieved quickly and cheaply by anyone with the inclination.

It is this inclination that inspires us to innovate. Process innovation emerges from the desire to solve a problem, or an inkling that the way it has always been done may not necessarily be the best way. As we have discussed in previous articles on innovation, a positive attitude towards change is crucial. In organisations this demands that business leaders support innovation initiatives and work to remove barriers to change. An innovation culture should not demand change for change’s sake, but it should empower people to conjure up new ideas and strive to make things better than they were before.

With such a mindset, companies can improve processes in numerous areas, from back-end operational or administrative tasks (from supply chain management to IT processes such as data backups), to customer-facing processes (such as improvements in marketing or after-sales care). There are also many different ways to make improvements. For example, removing or adapting steps which offer no customer or business value can improve efficiencies, and employee training can result in more customer-friendly sales processes.

For inspiration, question your processes and look for problems, such as processes that cause issues or are detrimental to customer value. Get those that are close to the process involved in the discussion, including employees, customers, business partners or suppliers; those that undergo a process regularly may be most likely to identify worthy areas for improvement. By seeking out problems or weaknesses, you can define an agenda for process innovation. From there, engage with your people to think up new approaches.

Smaller companies can gain invaluable insights from observing the innovative processes of larger firms. Observing the way more advanced companies do things could provide tips on how to make productivity or quality improvements. Even process innovations coming from other industry sectors could spur process innovations in your own world. The web abounds with reports and articles which showcase process improvements, so keep an eye on such resources to spot better ways of doing things.

Process innovation represents a significant and often untapped opportunity for value creation and competitive advantage. Take a minute to think about the way you do things, and ask: is there a better way?

More info – Different ways to innovate

More info – Use innovation to grow your business