Power through Recognition

A manager empowers others by giving them recognition which enhances their self-esteem and motivates them to continue to do their best work. A person’s power to achieve success is dependent upon his belief in himself and his desire to do consistently excellent work. A manager has more power to achieve his own objectives when the people who work for him are confident and motivated to do their best work.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

The Skill and the Will

All training, whether it is provided by the training department or by you, should accomplish two objectives. It should provide people with the skill, meaning the ability, to do the job. Or it should provide them with the will or the desire to do the job. Some training will accomplish both.

The skills training you provide your people will be dictated by the needs of the business and the current skills of the people. First you must determine what your people need to learn. Here are some questions that will help lead you to the answer:

• What are the goals and objectives of the area?
• What are the responsibilities of each job?
• What are the standards the people are expected to meet?
• What are the skills needed to meet the standards, fulfill the responsibilities, and achieve the objectives?
• What are the current skills and abilities of the people?
• What is the deficit between the skills needed and the current skills of the people?

Providing people with the skills to do the job is only half the training job. People must be motivated to apply the skills they have learned; therefore, some of the training should be principally motivational in nature. As you develop plan for motivating your people, you will want to ask yourself these questions:

• What should they know about the company in order to have a sense of pride?
• What I can teach them about the department that will give them a sense of pride?
• What kinds of personal growth training will enhance their self-confidence and personal pride?

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Changing Buying and Selling Processes

Winning companies are all focused on speed to market, cost reduction, and customer satisfaction—whether buying or selling goods, services, and solutions. Today, many leading companies are changing their selling processes and tools, including the following actions:

• Expanding self-service sales via Web-based sales catalogs of products and related services available to buyers.
• Creating customized electronic interfaces between themselves and their strategic customers to facilitate rapid order receipt and order processing. Typically, sellers provide their most favored customers with preferred pricing or large discounts.
• Offering multinational companies global pricing policies for products and services with economic-related adjustments, i.e., variations due to labor rates in specific countries or regions, inflation or deflation, value-added taxes, etc.
• Developing standard statements of work, acceptance criteria, and standards intervals for consistent on-time delivery worldwide.
• Understanding the buyer’s business needs and budget in order to develop customized solutions priced to fit the buyer’s desired business case.
• Providing financing to buyers to help them purchase products when required.
• Offering extended payment terms to customers, well beyond the usual net—15 days, or net—30 days to net—90 days or net—180 days.
• Developing Web portals to facilitate rapid and direct communications between sellers and their strategic partners.
• Providing countertrade, offsets, or counter purchases, in order to secure large purchases.

These actions are just a few of the many innovative process changes, tools, or unique business arrangements that sellers are using to build successful partnerships with their best buyers.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Direct-mail Marketing: Checklist

• Is there a perceived need for the product or service?
• Is it practical?
• Is it unique?
• Is the price right for your customers or prospects?
• Is it a good value?
• Is the markup sufficient to assure a profit?
• Is the market large enough? Does the product or service have broad appeal?
• Are there specific smaller segments of your list that have a strong desire for your product or service?
• Is it new? Will your customers perceive it as being new?
• Can it be photographed or illustrated interestingly?
• Are there sufficient unusual selling features to make your copy sizzle?
• Is it economical to ship? Is it fragile? Old shaped? Heavy? Bulky?
• Can it be personalized?
• Are there any legal problems to overcome?
• Is it safe to use?
• Is the supplier reputable?
• Will backup merchandise be available for fast shipment on reorders?
• Might returns be too huge?
• Will refurbishing of returned merchandise be practical?
• Is it, or can it be, packaged attractively?
• Are usage instructions clear?
• How does it compare to competitive products or services?
• Will it have exclusivity?
• Will it lend itself to repeat business?
• Is it consumable, so that there will be repeat orders?
• Is it faddish? Too short-lived?
• Is it too seasonal for direct mail selling?
• Can an add-on to the product make it more distinctive and salable?
• Will the number of stock keeping units – various sizes and colors – create problems?
• Does it lend itself to multiple pricing?
• Is it too readily available in stores?
• Is it like an old, hot item, so that its success is guaranteed?
• Is it doomed because similar items have failed?
• Does your mother, wife, brother, husband, sister, or kid like it?
• Is direct mail the way to go with it?
• Does it fill an unfilled niche in the marketplace?

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Communicate and Reinforce Responsibilities

Once you have clearly defined in your own mind the responsibilities of a particular job, the next step is communicating them to the person. People must be told not once, not twice, but repeatedly.

If a person is conscientious and capable of performing the job, why must you remind him of his responsibilities? If he has to be told more than once, maybe he doesn’t belong in the position.

Reminding people of their responsibilities is similar to reminding them of the goals and objectives. Due to the complexity of jobs and companies today, people on all levels can easily become sidetracked.

It’s not unusual to see people, even at high levels, involved in activities that are not in fulfillment of their job responsibilities. Nor do these activities contribute to the goals and objectives of the department or company. This is one of the primary reasons why companies don’t reach their objectives: people concentrate their efforts on activities that seem like good ideas at the time but that don’t lead them to their desired objectives.

People also have a natural tendency to do the things they like to do. They gravitate to certain types of activities because they are good at them and enjoy them. The result? The responsibilities they don’t enjoy go unfulfilled because the people either consciously or unconsciously let them fall through the cracks.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Fundamental Change

There is an evident and strong desire for corporate transformation. With all the smoke there has to be some fire. Against the background of multiple and profound changes and challenges in the business environment, management accepts that incremental is no longer enough.

How fundamental the transformation should be will depend upon the situation and circumstances of the individual company. There are easier ways of getting directorial and managerial kicks.

Circumstances might allow a gradual transition and incremental adjustment. Managers need to understand the profound nature of the distinction between evolutionary and revolutionary change, and the requirements for beginning about a revolution in thought. They must learn from radicals rather than administrators.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Converting Needs to Wants

Every consumer must acquire goods and services on a continuing basis to fill certain needs. Everyone must satisfy the fundamental needs for food, clothing, shelter, and transportation by purchasing things or, in some instances, temporarily using rented property and hired or leased transportation. By focusing on the benefits resulting from these goods and services, effective marketing converts needs to wants. A need for clothing may be translated into a desire (or want)  for designer clothes.

As easier-to-use software has enabled millions of nontechnical consumers to operate personal computers and as falling retail make these computers affordable to most households, computers have become fixtures in many offices and homes.

Companies that adopt the marketing concept focus on providing solutions to consumer problems. They promote product benefits rather than features to show the added value that computers will receive from the product.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

The Right Thing for your Company

Make sure that the outcomes you define for your people are in line with your company’s current strategy. With the dizzying pace of change in today’s business world, it is sometimes hard for managers to keep track. The key distinction is between mission and strategy. A company’s mission should remain constant, providing meaning and focus for generations of employees. A company’s strategy is simply the most effective way to execute that mission. It should change according to the demands of the contemporary business climate.

Although the constant reassessment of strategy is vital to the health of the company, it does place managers in a rather difficult position. They are the intermediaries, charged with explaining the new strategy to the employees and then translating it into clearly defined performance outcomes.

Often this can be as simple as telling your salespeople that with the new company strategy focused on growing market share rather than profit, each salesperson will now be encouraged to focus on the outcome, ‘sales volume,’ rather than the outcome ‘profit margin per sale.’

However, sometimes the changes in strategy are more radical and the pressures on managers to refocus employees on different outcomes are more acute. For example, the most effective strategy for many high-tech companies used to be innovation. Hence the large R&D budgets, the hordes of dishelved but creative software designers, and the unpredictable, slightly unfocused work environments. For the major players who dominate the marketplace, critical mass—getting your product to be accepted as the standard—is now more important than innovation. Innovation can be brought from the smaller boutique houses. Thus these larger companies need to change the way they operate to ensure that virtually everyone’s efforts are focused on spreading the new language/platform/product into the marketplace. This means that managers in these companies will have to hustle to redefine the desired outcomes and find new definitions of success. Number of users, for example, may now be more important than revenue per user.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Pride through Responsibility

If a person is to feel a sense of power in his job, he must feel a sense of pride—pride in the company, pride in the department or group, and perhaps most important, pride in himself.

Pride creates the desire to succeed; the desire to succeed causes people to dig down deep within themselves and draw upon untapped inner resources. Pride is perhaps the greatest catalyst for getting people to discover and use their own personal power.

One of the best ways to instill pride in people is by giving  them a sense of responsibility; by helping them know that they have an important job to do.

A sense of ownership is what we are trying to create. This sense of ownership must be present if you wish to create an entrepreneurial spirit.

If a person believes the job is lowly and insignificant, if he believes that others look upon the job as relatively unimportant, his performance will usually reflect this belief. On the other hand, if you repeatedly remind him of the importance of his job, he will usually perform the job with a sense of pride and purpose.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Purchase Decision Process

The act of buying is a significant part of everyone’s life. It is such a routine activity that we rarely consider in detail the mental process involved in product purchases. Just what are the steps in the purchase decision? Buyers usually pass through five stage process when they buy a good or service:

1. Stage 1: Problem Recognition. The buyer recognizes a need, desire, or problem. The marketer tries to determine which needs, desires, or problems stimulate the buyer to begin the purchase process.
2. Stage 2: Information Search. The buyer collects information about purchase alternatives. The successful marketer knows the sources of buyer information and their relative importance to the buyer.
3. Stage 3: Alternative Evaluation. The buyer evaluates purchase alternatives in light of various criteria. Since these criteria may differ in each purchase decision, the marketer determines which criteria are appropriate to that decision.
4. Step 4: Purchase Decision. The buyer selects a product from among the purchase alternatives. Up to this point, the marketer has done as much as possible to influence the buyer to buy his or her product.
5. Stage 5: Outcome. The buyer experiences some degree of satisfaction with the purchase decision. Knowledge of this satisfaction is crucial to the marketer.

Only when this decision process is understood can an effective marketing program developed. This analysis of the decision process in five distinct stages draws attention to the fact that the buying process begins before the purchase decision is made.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.