Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Expanding Social Business throughout the Entire Organization
Organizations that became early adopters of social technologies, using
them to engage with employees, clients and partners, are now moving
beyond the implementation phase and enjoying the benefits of social
business: improved customer service, increased efficiency and faster
product innovation among them.
CMOs can gain insights on external data from sources like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and public forums to react more swiftly to customer trends, build their brands and create exceptional customer experiences that inspire brand loyalty. According to a 2012 Nielsen study, one in three social media users prefer contacting customer service through social media than by phone.
Finance and the CFO
CFOs
can use data shared through social tools to streamline business
processes and drive results, particularly as social tools transition
from a new technology into an essential tool for conducting business. According to Gartner,
by 2016, 50 percent of large organizations will have internal
Facebook-like social networks, and that 30 percent of these will be
considered as essential as email and telephones are today.
From the CFO’s perspective, social tools pay off because they can reduce customer attrition, which is critical when you take into account that just a five percent decrease in customer attrition can boost profits by up to 95 percent. On the flip side, finding new customers can cost up to seven times as much as keeping existing customers.
Human resources are also receiving pressure from executive leadership; according to a 2013 Bersin by Deloitte study, over half of business leaders surveyed cite gaps in their leadership pipeline as one of their three critical obstacles to growth.
For recruiting purposes, human resources can use data shared through social tools to identify the skill sets and attributes that create successful, engaged employees. This information can then be used throughout the recruitment and hiring process, to ensure potential candidates will be a cultural fit.
HR is also using social tools as a part of the onboarding process. During orientation, new employees create their personal profiles on the internal social network and are shown how to find experts on various topics, access information and collaborate on projects with colleagues. Not only does this enable employees to quickly acclimate to their new position, but by incorporating social into their daily work processes from the onset, organizations create future ambassadors and power users of social technologies.
A great example of a company using social tools for human resources is Electrolux, a global leader in consumer and professional appliances, including the Frigidaire line of refrigerators. Having recently moved employees from its Brussels location to a new facility in Stockholm, Electrolux HR created a community on the social business platform where employees created and shared information related to the relocation. Employees were engaged, felt better informed and were more comfortable with the relocation process overall.
Adopted from Sandy Carter Blog
Marketing and the CMO
Social is often first embraced by marketing, as chief marketing officers (CMO) quickly saw the value in being able to monitor and quickly respond to customer conversations. A recent IBM study of more than 1,700 CMOs reveals that 82 percent plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years. Another survey by Duke University’s Fuqua Business School revealed that social media spending as a percentage of marketing budgets will more than double in the next five years. Couple this with the fact that CMOs are slated to spend more on IT than CIOs, and it's safe to say that there’s a lot of focus on the right social tools to help and retain customers.CMOs can gain insights on external data from sources like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and public forums to react more swiftly to customer trends, build their brands and create exceptional customer experiences that inspire brand loyalty. According to a 2012 Nielsen study, one in three social media users prefer contacting customer service through social media than by phone.
Finance and the CFO
CFOs
can use data shared through social tools to streamline business
processes and drive results, particularly as social tools transition
from a new technology into an essential tool for conducting business. According to Gartner,
by 2016, 50 percent of large organizations will have internal
Facebook-like social networks, and that 30 percent of these will be
considered as essential as email and telephones are today.From the CFO’s perspective, social tools pay off because they can reduce customer attrition, which is critical when you take into account that just a five percent decrease in customer attrition can boost profits by up to 95 percent. On the flip side, finding new customers can cost up to seven times as much as keeping existing customers.
Human Resources
Organizations cannot succeed without focusing on acquiring, empowering and growing talent. Human resource executives can use social tools throughout the recruiting, hiring, onboarding and employee development process to help create a happier, more productive, global workforce.Human resources are also receiving pressure from executive leadership; according to a 2013 Bersin by Deloitte study, over half of business leaders surveyed cite gaps in their leadership pipeline as one of their three critical obstacles to growth.
For recruiting purposes, human resources can use data shared through social tools to identify the skill sets and attributes that create successful, engaged employees. This information can then be used throughout the recruitment and hiring process, to ensure potential candidates will be a cultural fit.
HR is also using social tools as a part of the onboarding process. During orientation, new employees create their personal profiles on the internal social network and are shown how to find experts on various topics, access information and collaborate on projects with colleagues. Not only does this enable employees to quickly acclimate to their new position, but by incorporating social into their daily work processes from the onset, organizations create future ambassadors and power users of social technologies.
A great example of a company using social tools for human resources is Electrolux, a global leader in consumer and professional appliances, including the Frigidaire line of refrigerators. Having recently moved employees from its Brussels location to a new facility in Stockholm, Electrolux HR created a community on the social business platform where employees created and shared information related to the relocation. Employees were engaged, felt better informed and were more comfortable with the relocation process overall.
Adopted from Sandy Carter Blog
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Types of Intranet Portals - 1 page cheat sheet
Many of you have asked me how to position our portal solution as an INTRANET PLATFORM, and who should be the right audiences. Sharing the note below for everyone's benefit.
Below is a quick cheat sheet that you can refer to and points to talk with your customers.
HR portal -- main customer: VP of HR or Corpcom
We need a way to create/convey corporate culture
We need employee self-service & manager self-service
We need simple transactions & content (CEO corner, onboarding, compliance, training docs, etc)
We need to transform our workforce
Collaboration, content, & filesharing platform -- main customer: CIO or LOB executive teams
We need common searchable filestores
We need a social platform
We need departmental sites
Business-driven set of apps -- main customer: LOB sponsor
We need a "process portal". a "task portal", or a "role-based portal"
Customer support, supply chain management, sales force automation, logistics, clinical portal, etc
Backend integration is key
We differentiate ourselves using unique applications
Application delivery platform -- main customer: IT
We are building out an "intranet infrastructure" or a "platform as a service"
We aim to drive employee adoption upfront & add apps over time
We may combine internal-facing with external-facing sites
We want to reduce cost, reduce time to market for new apps, increase reuse & consistency, drive SOA
Below is a quick cheat sheet that you can refer to and points to talk with your customers.
HR portal -- main customer: VP of HR or Corpcom
We need a way to create/convey corporate culture
We need employee self-service & manager self-service
We need simple transactions & content (CEO corner, onboarding, compliance, training docs, etc)
We need to transform our workforce
Collaboration, content, & filesharing platform -- main customer: CIO or LOB executive teams
We need common searchable filestores
We need a social platform
We need departmental sites
Business-driven set of apps -- main customer: LOB sponsor
We need a "process portal". a "task portal", or a "role-based portal"
Customer support, supply chain management, sales force automation, logistics, clinical portal, etc
Backend integration is key
We differentiate ourselves using unique applications
Application delivery platform -- main customer: IT
We are building out an "intranet infrastructure" or a "platform as a service"
We aim to drive employee adoption upfront & add apps over time
We may combine internal-facing with external-facing sites
We want to reduce cost, reduce time to market for new apps, increase reuse & consistency, drive SOA
Monday, January 30, 2012
'Capacity to Fail - Focus on short and long term goals- Nitin Paranjpe'
Good read Guys... check it out
Name: Nitin Paranjpe
Age: 48
Designation: Chief Executive Officer, Hindustan Unilever
The Challenge: To reignite growth at India’s largest consumer goods company
What He Has Achieved: Sales have grown by a third, while profits are up 17 percent. The company’s market cap is up nearly 60 percent to Rs. 84,020 crore
How He Did It: He got employees to focus on both short-term and long-term goals
In 1999, the late C.K. Prahlad, who was on the board of Hindustan Unilever, had chosen to mentor some of us. During the course of the mentorship, he asked me the difference between an entrepreneur and a manager. I had given him the most obvious answer with which he wasn’t pleased.
According to him, the only difference between the two is the relationship between ambition and resources. Managers have a mindset that manages resources. So, ambition (A) equals resources (R), which is a steady state condition. There is no entrepreneur who starts off with A=R. He has virtually no resources, but he has big dreams and there is a mismatch between ambition and resources. Ambition is substantially greater than resources.
I kept reflecting on this and it led me to conclude that the only driver of innovation is a mismatch between ambition and resources. You can either constrain resources or dramatically increase ambition. What we’ve tried to do in this business is to help people understand this.
Let’s take for example our drive to treble our rural direct distribution coverage. Over the years, we had been adding a small number of outlets and patting ourselves on the back saying we were ahead of our competitors. But our competitors were narrowing these gaps.
I quickly discovered that most people don’t achieve much when you give them a slightly higher target because they operate out of a fear of failure. So, we came up with an ambitious plan to add 500,000 more outlets in a year. This at a time when we had been adding just 15,000-20,000 outlets a year. In hindsight, it was the most irrational decision, but look at what we achieved.
When you increase the target so dramatically it becomes impossible to have a rational dialogue. The trick lies in getting people to suspend belief and judgement for a while and paint them a picture that in theory it could happen. How would it feel to do what no one has ever done before? How would it feel to get there?
He [the employee] knows that if he gets 400,000 instead of 500,000 he will be a hero and everyone in the company will think he is a hero. Now, if I had asked him to do 25,000 and he had reached 20,000, I would have thought he had failed and he too. The big trick in many of these things is to think in terms of targets that put ambition so much in excess of resources that you just eliminate the fear of failure. Another change we’ve made is in incorporating the culture of ‘and’. The day you are able to get two seemingly incompatible things together, you create even superior value. People often talk about the choice between topline and bottom line. To me that is a false choice. It is always both.
Most people say we either need to do short term or long term. I say we have to run the business with a bifocal lens. Part of it is looking at this week, this month and this quarter and the other part is how do I shape this business and make it ‘future-proof’ five years from today. Both have to be done.
We found a way to speak for the business in the short term but ‘tangibilised’ it for the long term. For this, we needed to articulate in a compelling manner what we need to do for the long term and the actions that we need to do now.
Let’s see how this works. We have two tasks. First is to make sure that every brand is competitive in every geography. The second thing we said is, if we have to win in the India of tomorrow we have to first start with a point of view of the India of tomorrow. We start with a point of view of the consumer, segments, channels, geographies and categories that will become large.
If you have a point of view that says that many of the categories are small today, but I can see that many of the trends and consumers, channels will become large, then it is crucial that our shares in these categories and channels and segments of tomorrow have to be higher than the average.
We called up 12 sub-categories and said you can be sure they are going to be big categories of tomorrow — face wash and conditioners are one of them. It made us realise that the pace at which these develop might be faster than we imagine and so the resources and the intensity with which we market them need to be different and get a different sense of urgency.
We introduced a simple phrase, ‘get tailwinds’. Which means the moment I am stronger in the things that are going to be winning tomorrow, automatically, even if I hold my position in other categories, my weighted average keeps moving upwards. That is what I mean by business gets a tailwind.
While fixing the business today is important, if you are just obsessed with that, you will never be doing anything for the future and your business will face headwinds. Everyone must be obsessed with doing things that will generate tailwinds. That’s another example of a bifocal lens.
Through all this, you’ve got to ensure that as you go through a business cycle, at a particularly challenging time, you never lose sight of the belief. A leader who has lost sight of the belief has lost his right to lead in many ways.
However challenging the time is, it is critical that you reflect, introspect, but you must always have belief. One of the things I have tried to do in my career is, whenever there is a challenging time, never doubt your ability. Addressing the issue is not as difficult as you think. It is about confronting the problem and being honest about it.
I faced such a situation in the middle of 2009. There were two quarters when we didn’t grow volume. In fact, we had a volume decline. It was very early in my CEO tenure. In that period, we had some choices and we could have addressed [the situation] that arose when we were bringing prices down and stock was with the wholesaler. We thought it would work itself through, but it didn’t. I wish we had taken a call earlier to take it back. That’s a lesson learned.
But through the entire period we were brutal in our assessment. We took the actions that were required.
Brutal honesty simply means that you confront the facts as they are. Don’t try and justify why what you did was right, what you could have done differently. If you have a team which has that intellectual honesty and confidence, then it becomes easy. And, of course, it requires the humility to say, ‘yeah this went wrong’.
Organisations like ours recognise that there are several areas where we can learn and keep risks minimal and manage to learn at relatively low cost by restricting it to geography and learn the way we want to. But in this, rigour and speed are important. There is no trade-off. I want both.
I don’t have an issue with failing. But if you fail, please fail early so that it doesn’t become too expensive and you learn from that failure. If we are able to learn from the mistakes and failure and we never make the same mistake again, I think the failure is well worth it and organisations must find ways by which we can get these learning experiences relatively cheap.
Many people ask me, ‘do you encourage failure?’ Absolutely not! I want to encourage winning, but to win you must also have the capacity to fail. I accept that to win you will also fail sometimes
Name: Nitin Paranjpe
Age: 48
Designation: Chief Executive Officer, Hindustan Unilever
The Challenge: To reignite growth at India’s largest consumer goods company
What He Has Achieved: Sales have grown by a third, while profits are up 17 percent. The company’s market cap is up nearly 60 percent to Rs. 84,020 crore
How He Did It: He got employees to focus on both short-term and long-term goals
In 1999, the late C.K. Prahlad, who was on the board of Hindustan Unilever, had chosen to mentor some of us. During the course of the mentorship, he asked me the difference between an entrepreneur and a manager. I had given him the most obvious answer with which he wasn’t pleased.
According to him, the only difference between the two is the relationship between ambition and resources. Managers have a mindset that manages resources. So, ambition (A) equals resources (R), which is a steady state condition. There is no entrepreneur who starts off with A=R. He has virtually no resources, but he has big dreams and there is a mismatch between ambition and resources. Ambition is substantially greater than resources.
I kept reflecting on this and it led me to conclude that the only driver of innovation is a mismatch between ambition and resources. You can either constrain resources or dramatically increase ambition. What we’ve tried to do in this business is to help people understand this.
Let’s take for example our drive to treble our rural direct distribution coverage. Over the years, we had been adding a small number of outlets and patting ourselves on the back saying we were ahead of our competitors. But our competitors were narrowing these gaps.
I quickly discovered that most people don’t achieve much when you give them a slightly higher target because they operate out of a fear of failure. So, we came up with an ambitious plan to add 500,000 more outlets in a year. This at a time when we had been adding just 15,000-20,000 outlets a year. In hindsight, it was the most irrational decision, but look at what we achieved.
When you increase the target so dramatically it becomes impossible to have a rational dialogue. The trick lies in getting people to suspend belief and judgement for a while and paint them a picture that in theory it could happen. How would it feel to do what no one has ever done before? How would it feel to get there?
He [the employee] knows that if he gets 400,000 instead of 500,000 he will be a hero and everyone in the company will think he is a hero. Now, if I had asked him to do 25,000 and he had reached 20,000, I would have thought he had failed and he too. The big trick in many of these things is to think in terms of targets that put ambition so much in excess of resources that you just eliminate the fear of failure. Another change we’ve made is in incorporating the culture of ‘and’. The day you are able to get two seemingly incompatible things together, you create even superior value. People often talk about the choice between topline and bottom line. To me that is a false choice. It is always both.
Most people say we either need to do short term or long term. I say we have to run the business with a bifocal lens. Part of it is looking at this week, this month and this quarter and the other part is how do I shape this business and make it ‘future-proof’ five years from today. Both have to be done.
We found a way to speak for the business in the short term but ‘tangibilised’ it for the long term. For this, we needed to articulate in a compelling manner what we need to do for the long term and the actions that we need to do now.
Let’s see how this works. We have two tasks. First is to make sure that every brand is competitive in every geography. The second thing we said is, if we have to win in the India of tomorrow we have to first start with a point of view of the India of tomorrow. We start with a point of view of the consumer, segments, channels, geographies and categories that will become large.
If you have a point of view that says that many of the categories are small today, but I can see that many of the trends and consumers, channels will become large, then it is crucial that our shares in these categories and channels and segments of tomorrow have to be higher than the average.
We called up 12 sub-categories and said you can be sure they are going to be big categories of tomorrow — face wash and conditioners are one of them. It made us realise that the pace at which these develop might be faster than we imagine and so the resources and the intensity with which we market them need to be different and get a different sense of urgency.
We introduced a simple phrase, ‘get tailwinds’. Which means the moment I am stronger in the things that are going to be winning tomorrow, automatically, even if I hold my position in other categories, my weighted average keeps moving upwards. That is what I mean by business gets a tailwind.
While fixing the business today is important, if you are just obsessed with that, you will never be doing anything for the future and your business will face headwinds. Everyone must be obsessed with doing things that will generate tailwinds. That’s another example of a bifocal lens.
Through all this, you’ve got to ensure that as you go through a business cycle, at a particularly challenging time, you never lose sight of the belief. A leader who has lost sight of the belief has lost his right to lead in many ways.
However challenging the time is, it is critical that you reflect, introspect, but you must always have belief. One of the things I have tried to do in my career is, whenever there is a challenging time, never doubt your ability. Addressing the issue is not as difficult as you think. It is about confronting the problem and being honest about it.
I faced such a situation in the middle of 2009. There were two quarters when we didn’t grow volume. In fact, we had a volume decline. It was very early in my CEO tenure. In that period, we had some choices and we could have addressed [the situation] that arose when we were bringing prices down and stock was with the wholesaler. We thought it would work itself through, but it didn’t. I wish we had taken a call earlier to take it back. That’s a lesson learned.
But through the entire period we were brutal in our assessment. We took the actions that were required.
Brutal honesty simply means that you confront the facts as they are. Don’t try and justify why what you did was right, what you could have done differently. If you have a team which has that intellectual honesty and confidence, then it becomes easy. And, of course, it requires the humility to say, ‘yeah this went wrong’.
Organisations like ours recognise that there are several areas where we can learn and keep risks minimal and manage to learn at relatively low cost by restricting it to geography and learn the way we want to. But in this, rigour and speed are important. There is no trade-off. I want both.
I don’t have an issue with failing. But if you fail, please fail early so that it doesn’t become too expensive and you learn from that failure. If we are able to learn from the mistakes and failure and we never make the same mistake again, I think the failure is well worth it and organisations must find ways by which we can get these learning experiences relatively cheap.
Many people ask me, ‘do you encourage failure?’ Absolutely not! I want to encourage winning, but to win you must also have the capacity to fail. I accept that to win you will also fail sometimes
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Marketing Fundas made easy
A Professor at one of the b-schools was explaining marketing concepts to the
Students:
1. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: "I am
very rich. "Marry me!" - That's Direct Marketing"
2. You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a
gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and
pointing at you says: "He's very rich.
"Marry him." -That's Advertising"
3. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and get her telephone number. The next day, you
call and say: "Hi, I'm very rich. "Marry me - That's Telemarketing"
4. You're at a party and see gorgeous girl. You get up
and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour
her a drink, you open the door (of the car)for her,
pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her ride and
then say:"By the way, I'm rich. Will you
"Marry Me?" - That's Public Relations"
5. You're at a party and see gorgeous girl. She walks
up to you and says:"You are very rich!
"Can you marry ! me?" - That's Brand Recognition"
6. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and say: "I am very rich. Marry me!" She gives you
a nice hard slap on your face. -
"That's Customer Feedback"
7. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and say: "I am very rich. Marry me!" And she
introduces you to her husband. -
"That's demand and supply gap"
8. You see a gorgeous girl at a
party. You go up to
her and before you say anything, another person come
and tell her: "I'm rich. Will you marry me?" and she
goes with him -
"That's competition eating into your market share"
9. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and before you say: "I'm rich, Marry me!" your
wife arrives. -
"That's restriction for entering new markets"
Students:
1. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: "I am
very rich. "Marry me!" - That's Direct Marketing"
2. You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a
gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and
pointing at you says: "He's very rich.
"Marry him." -That's Advertising"
3. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and get her telephone number. The next day, you
call and say: "Hi, I'm very rich. "Marry me - That's Telemarketing"
4. You're at a party and see gorgeous girl. You get up
and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour
her a drink, you open the door (of the car)for her,
pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her ride and
then say:"By the way, I'm rich. Will you
"Marry Me?" - That's Public Relations"
5. You're at a party and see gorgeous girl. She walks
up to you and says:"You are very rich!
"Can you marry ! me?" - That's Brand Recognition"
6. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and say: "I am very rich. Marry me!" She gives you
a nice hard slap on your face. -
"That's Customer Feedback"
7. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and say: "I am very rich. Marry me!" And she
introduces you to her husband. -
"That's demand and supply gap"
8. You see a gorgeous girl at a
party. You go up to
her and before you say anything, another person come
and tell her: "I'm rich. Will you marry me?" and she
goes with him -
"That's competition eating into your market share"
9. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and before you say: "I'm rich, Marry me!" your
wife arrives. -
"That's restriction for entering new markets"
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Marketing Analytics made simple....
Analytics involves the application of advanced quantitative techniques on company and third-party market research data to help you make the best possible decision in a given situation. Analytical solutions combine insights from diverse disciplines, including statistics, data mining and operations research. Across industries, companies have used the power of analytics to forecast customer behaviour and make better decisions everyday.
Now, to understand how Analytics can help you is that:
"Connect the dots" in your customer relationship data to understand complex patterns of behaviour
Take the "guesswork" out of decision making - tactical, strategic or operational
Identify the best course of action to take at every decision point during your interactions with customers
Guide managers at all levels to achieve deeper understanding of their current and potential customers
Reduce costs due, by detecting abnormal patterns of behaviour and flagging it in real time
Reduce write-offs from bad debts by identifying potentially risky customers
Increased return on marketing investments through fine-grained segmentation and precise targeting of prospects and customers
Generalizing these further, Analytic solutions can be classified into three different types – explanatory models, predictive models and decision models.
More to come soon.....
Now, to understand how Analytics can help you is that:
"Connect the dots" in your customer relationship data to understand complex patterns of behaviour
Take the "guesswork" out of decision making - tactical, strategic or operational
Identify the best course of action to take at every decision point during your interactions with customers
Guide managers at all levels to achieve deeper understanding of their current and potential customers
Reduce costs due, by detecting abnormal patterns of behaviour and flagging it in real time
Reduce write-offs from bad debts by identifying potentially risky customers
Increased return on marketing investments through fine-grained segmentation and precise targeting of prospects and customers
Generalizing these further, Analytic solutions can be classified into three different types – explanatory models, predictive models and decision models.
More to come soon.....
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