All articles by David SteinBlog Index

Everyone at your organization who interacts with customers or potential customers is responsible for creating a customer first corporate culture. It’s not just the responsibility of your customer service people.

Many sales people believe the key to success is to be very aggressive – to push hard, and have a big “ask”, before they have established a trusted relationship with their potential client.

The principle of the “Small Ask” works in reverse:

1. Care about the problem your prospective client is trying to solve.
2. Think about an approach that is in the best interest of the client. One that mitigates risk, and builds confidence in the shortest period of time.
3. Start with a smaller deal that gives you the opportunity to build a relationship, and see the potential your solution can deliver.

This approach is not commonplace. Many buyers will be shocked by your less aggressive approach and actually embrace it. Many sales managers may also be surprised, and ask, why aren’t you going for the jumbo, enterprise deal?

Our response:
By going against the grain in the short term, you will have to opportunity to quickly build a relationship, establish value, and grow the deal size significantly over time. In today’s challenging and cynical market, an approach and a corporate culture that really puts customers first can be a powerful source of competitive advantage.

The secret of man’s success resides in his insight into the moods of people, and his tact in dealing with them.- J.G. Holland

Tags: competitive advantage, Corporate Culture, customer first, david stein, Sales

I often read books, articles, and posts from companies that I admire; companies like Apple, Google, BMW, IDEO. My goal is understand what makes them succeed, so I can apply some of these strategies at our company, Rypple. Some of the reasons for their success are more obvious: a great product line, great marketing, great people. The question is, “why do these companies have great people, products, and marketing, leading to outstanding results?” The answer, the root of their success, may shock you: Their employee’s find meaning in their work.

The leaders of these companies make this happen through three key actions:

Clarity of vision and purpose:
Every employee in the company understands the mission and vision of the business, and how their weekly activities will impact company goals. The DNA of the company then guides day to day activities.

Ongoing coaching:
The leaders (managers) of these companies provide continuous coaching and mentoring to their teams. As opposed to providing their teams with guidance only once or twice a year through a formalized process, they meet regularly. These quick conversations ensure their teams are focused on the right actions, get feedback they can put into action immediately, and are learning all the time. This constant communication fosters a collaborative and inspiring environment.

Recognition for achievement:
Leaders of great organizations understand that their people aren’t solely motivated by money, but instead, derive a lot of meaning from recognition. Whether publicly or privately, being recognized for a job well done makes us all feel validated, appreciated, and more engaged in our work. We all like to receive Kudos, and great companies ensure that accomplishments are recognized. We believe that meaning leads to engagement, and engagement leads to amazing results!

With these answers in hand, I’m working hard to ensure that our team finds meaning in the work they do everyday.

What are you doing at your organization to find meaning and achieve extraordinary results?

Tags: achievement, Coaching, david stein, engagement, Feedback, Leadership, motivation, recognition, Rypple

Many leaders have been enviously looking at Apple to try to understand the secrets of their success, especially the day after the iPad launch.

In reading a summary of Steve Jobs’ launch comments, there are 3 key insights to be gained that we can all apply to achieve success at work. These insights apply to advancing your career and improving the performance of your team and your company.

1. Clearly understand how your solution fits in and is different to the current landscape. This is how Jobs articulates the current landscape gap:
   

   “So all of us use laptops and smartphones now. The question has arisen lately is there room for a third category of device, something between a laptop and an iPhone. Tough hurdle. Has to be better than the other two.”

   It’s easy to apply this to your own career. Where does your team fit into your company? Do you understand your internal and external professional landscapes? Can you clearly explain that position to your team? To the rest of the company?

2. Clearly articulate how your solution fills the gap and what key problems it will solve. Notice the focus here. The goal isn’t to be better at everything, but better at a few key, valuable activities.
   

   “What tasks? Better at browsing the Web. Doing email. Sharing photos, Watching videos, Music. Playing games. Reading ebooks. It’s going to have to be better at these tasks or it has no reason for being… netbooks aren’t better at anything.”

   You need to understand your key problems before you can figure out how to solve them. Do you have a concise list of the most critical challenges you face? Can you clearly articulate solutions to your team? If the solutions are unknown, can you lead them down a focused path to finding them?

3. Be confident in communicating the benefits. If you have identified a problem, have a clear vision of how it fits within the existing landscape, and focus on a few key things that make your offering great, then you should be confident in communicating your story.
   

   “What this device does is extraordinary. The best browsing experience you’ve ever had. Way better than a laptop.”

   Listen closely to what Jobs says. Each keynote has a few, highly focused keywords that he uses over and over throughout the keynote. Today’s word was magic. Even for internal messages to your team, the key is to take a strong, bold position, be confident in communicating it clearly, and don’t back down.

We can learn much from Apple and their recent successes, and apply some of their key principles to enable our successes.

Tags: Apple, business insights, iPad, Rypple, Steve Jobs

Many of us have grandiose plans for New Year’s resolutions with the new year so recently upon us. We think of all sorts of personal and business actions we plan to take to improve our performance: exercising more, eating less junk food, being more punctual, being more disciplined, improving a skill, etc. It’s great to plan ahead and imagine a set of actions we could take, but this intent rarely results in us taking real action leading to positive change.

I’ve often thought about why this intent doesn’t translate into results. We look back one year later and not much has changed. The end result: no actions have been taken and our desired results have not been achieved.

One of my trusted advisers recently pointed me to The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, which takes his experience as a surgeon making to-do lists and applies it to the outside world (Malcolm Gladwell, in a guest review on Amazon, says “It has been years since I read a book so powerful and so thought-provoking”). Gawande’s insights and my own realizations led me to a conclusion: the reasons we fail are simple.

1. We don’t start with a list
2. Our objectives can’t be broken down into weekly, measurable actions
3. We don’t regularly track our progress and get feedback on how we’re doing

I’m approaching this year differently. Here’s how:

1. I’ve made a concise list of achievable personal and professional goals to improve my performance
2. I keep them visible to me and my trusted advisers and get regular coaching
3. Each week, I measure my progress against the actions I’ve committed to take
4. I’m having the people I work with do the same thing and I’m giving them feedback on key near term actions they’ll take

We’re still in January so it’s early days, but so far this approach of making a list and tracking my actions is working. I’m taking small actions each week that will impact me greatly over the course of the year.

I know what’s on my list. What’s on yours?

Tags: business development, business performance, community, customer outreach, david stein, decision support, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, future, lessons, listen, meaningful results, peer review, People, personal review, product, quick and easy, Rypple, service, team, team review, use

In the old days of building software, you would discover, document, design and build an entire set of features before letting a user actually use the software.

This Waterfall model was supposed to be the most effective way to develop software. But we learnt its limitations first hand when we started using it.  It created a false sense of security.

We used to think that it reduced risk because if you knew all the requirements up front, you could accurately estimate the time and effort needed to build software.   Waterfall assumes that you can’t start until you know everything you will need to do, in great detail.

We found the opposite to be true: projects took longer, were most expensive, and were riskier than anticipated.   The requirements we originally specified were usually far from what we actually built.

Why? A few reasons:

• The list of  “must-have” requirements is long at the beginning of a project
• Users take forever to sign-off on requirements, because they do not want to miss anything
• Incorrectly interpreted specifications and time lags resulted in expensive re-work

We took a different approach with Rypple.  We decided to be Agile.  We studied the methodology, and most importantly, practiced it, to get better at doing it.

The more we use Agile, the more we are convinced it’s the right approach.

There are many excellent resources to get you up to speed. Our favorites is by Mary Poppendieck.  We met Mary at our last company and she’s a great inspiration for learning by doing.  We’d be remiss if we didn’t link to Mary’s suggested #1 book on the subject of Agile (it has nothing to do with software – it’s about building cars).

Agile forces us to:

• Break features into small and manageable chunks
• Start with the user experience (user story), not the screen design
• Minimize excess inventory and waste by not focusing on future features too early
• Get user input early and often

This approach initially made some members of our Rypple team anxious. They’re now Agile evangelists.   We now embrace Agile and all that it can do for us. We are most thankful that we don’t spend too much time trying to forecast the future accurately. We embrace user feedback so we get each small feature right.

Agile is a journey that we are on.  We continue to learn and improve our approach with what works for Rypple.

Agile means we’re already working quickly to deliver a constant stream of features that our users actually want and actually use.  And that feels good.

Tags: agile, poppendieck, process, waterfall