Tag: communication

The price you want

FabrizioLeave a comment

You have a good product, some customers, and then you start losing opportunities because they say you are too expensive.

Two options.

You cut the prices (discounts, special offers, etc. fall into this same category). It’s a risky game, of course everybody else can follow you there.

You work on perceived value. And you can go about it like this.

  1. Express value – Many times features are disguised as value, often mere functional value, so you need to start digging what the customer really wants.
  2. Reframe value – It might be that the problem you are solving is not worth the price you are asking, so you need to figure out if there is a deeper feeling, ambition, desire that you can leverage.
  3. Work on brand – Your story, your tone, your appeal can make your product desirable and unlock a fear of being left out.

Cutting prices is short-term (and short-viewed), working on perceived value takes resources and time.

The sooner you start working on 1, 2, and 3, in parallel, the better positioned you will be to ask the price you want.

From the top

FabrizioLeave a comment

There are companies where it is normal to talk about mistakes and failures, and there are companies where all you hear is success, success, success.

Of course, the latter still make mistakes. It’s just that their culture makes it very difficult to go out there and say: “here, I have done this, and I was wrong”. So, mistakes are repeated over time. People feel stuck, learning is at a minimum, frustration rises.

Fortunately, there is something very concrete that leaders can do. They can share their own failures as learning opportunity for their own group.

It always starts from the top.

Ask this instead

FabrizioLeave a comment

When companies grow and get to a certain size – say, 3-400 employees – the tendency is to add layers of management and middle-management to set the stage for the future growth.

That’s when something typically happens that ends up actually hindering the growth they are seeking.

It is the time when the company stops solving interesting problems and starts serving individual agendas.

It is the time of more and more meetings to find alignment, the time of blaming it on others, the time of politics and gossiping. It is a time dominated by opinions and personal anecdotes. Facts lose importance. Indeed, they barely get measured because everyone is busy pleasing those up the ranks while trying to come out first among peers.

It is where motivation dies and talent retention becomes a serious problem.

So when you hire or promote managers for your growing company, ask them not about their previous experience and their track record. Ask them instead how they plan to manage their team, how they will be handling conflict and contrasting ideas, how they will be making decisions and manage the change that comes from those decisions.

These hires will determine your possibility to get to the next phase. Be intentional about them.

Irrelevant

FabrizioLeave a comment

Nobody likes the idea of being irrelevant, and yet a growing incapacity to focus and control our attention is making us more irrelevant than ever.

What will you do about that?

People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. […] they actually think they’re more productive. They actually think they tend to – and most notably, they think they can shut it off, and that’s been the most striking aspect of this research. […] unfortunately, they’ve developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. They’re suckers for irrelevancy. They just can’t keep on task.

Clifford Nass, The Myth of Multitasking

Stalling and advancing

FabrizioLeave a comment

Things that stall a (professional) relationship: sarcasm, passive-aggressive messages, dominating the conversation, lack of communication, inappropriate comments, delays with no explanation, losing your temper, unilateral decisions, power moves, keeping score.

Things that advance a (professional) relationship: helping, saying I am sorry, asking for a chat when there’s a misunderstanding, listening, asking open questions, sharing mistakes, starting with how are you? and tell me more about that, telling about how you feel.

Thinking about that relationship that’s making your workdays miserable, are you stalling or advancing it?