Shut Up and Listen - to Your Prospects

On the weekend I was watching the greatest show on television right now - Mad Men. The agency had just lost their anchor client and they were horribly desperate to get some new business. The partners were considering their options when they were informed that an ideal prospect was willing to meet with them and hear their ideas. It was music to my ears when the most senior partner of the firm said of the potential meeting "we will listen more than we talk". Too often in the early stages of bringing a new concept to a potential customer people get caught up in trying to sell whatever they have rather than trying to learn what might be desired. This is usually because the new product representative is so excited/desperate to gain acceptance from a potential customer that they miss the fact that the customer is often very willing to let them know a great deal about how best to proceed - if only they would shut up and listen. Asking the right questions and paying as much attention as possible to every detail of the answers is most often not only the best way to get your overall product, marketing and sales plans on the right track, but is usually the best way build a relationship and close that specific sale opportunity as well. In helping companies and their teams to effectively engage and listen to their initial prospects we have not had one case where the learning that resulted did not adjust either their product or their target market or both.

Don't Believe the Hype

How Do Hype Cycles Work?

Each Hype Cycle drills down into the five key phases of a technology’s life cycle.

1. Technology Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.

2. Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories—often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.

3. Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.

4. Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.

5. Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.

The Man, The Boy, and The Donkey

Last night I was reading to my son and came upon this fable by Aesop. It is a classic product management issue and applies to many entrepreneurs as well who often bounce from one advisor or investor or mentor or industry veteran to the next and change their story every time an "expert" voices an opinion. Much better to gather to a bunch of input, seek inspiration and weigh comments against the views of your team and make fewer more well thought out decisions.

The Man the Boy and the Donkey
http://www.aesops-fables.org.uk/aesop-fable-the-man-the-boy-and-the-donkey.htm

Innovation in a Recession

Here is a positive spin on our current landscape from an innovation perspective.

http://www.psfk.com/2009/04/video-joi-ito-on-innovation-during-a-recession.html

There are many aspects of this perspective that are accurate however the reduction in available funds for current initiatives that are losing money is a very real threat. While the strong ideas should survive and emerge even stronger for it - it is going to be very hard for many organizations and initiatives to survive to the end of the year without major restructuring.

Most business plans are a waste of everyone's time

It seems that no one wants to read to your business plan - probably not even yourself.

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/investors-pay-business-plans-little-heed-study-finds/.

This is in part because the document format we learned writing reports in school is ultra boring and padded with unnecessary fluff and filler and excessive syntax that isn't appropriate, efficient or useful for conveying exciting new ideas.

Well conducted dialogue and demonstrations are far superior (possibly supported by images, key facts and examples). And trusted referalls are really the only way to get the real mindshare of potential investors.

While in theory business plans help entreprenuers to focus and think through critical issues - the reality is that the usual effort put into sentence structure, readability, flow of logic, grammatical correctness, formatting, and layout generally sucks up a ton of valuable time that isn't repayed. Concise summaries, point form, and presentation form, (all with references to sources and supporting information) will pay off - big plans won't.

Time to Commercialize Tech in Various Verticals

This diagram was taken from a study by the National Petroleum Council http://www.npc.org/Study_Topic_Papers/26-TTG-OGTechDevelopment.pdf which juxtaposes the incredible advances that that technology has provided to the industry against the massive hurdles faced by new innovations in getting to commercialization.

In a study by McKinsey, consumer products were shown to take on average about 8 years to go from idea to 50% market penetration, medical products take 12 years, ADSL as an example in telecom took 15 years, and the 15 E&P technologies profiled to an average of over 20 years to get to the commercial stage and almost 30 years to get to 50% adoption.

Tech Management Team Composition and Compensation

Great salary, equity ownership and management team composition evolution information for private technology as they grow and conduct various financing rounds http://bit.ly/5ysl9.