Tag: suppliers
4 Tips to Supercharge Business Profitability
Relationships are tricky to maintain and keep healthy, but if you run a business, it is vital to the continued success of your enterprise. I’m not talking about having an excellent relationship with your wife or husband; I am speaking about all of the relationships you form while working in a business. They all matter. They are key to supercharge business profitability.
Are you one that believes that creativity can be learned? We are among that group. We also believe in suggestions for innovative thinking can boost team creativity through effective collaboration.
Through a series of sparks and not a single flash of insight. Certainly our way of thinking.
I’m using the term relationship to cover a wide variety of human interactions you will encounter as an employee of a company. They are key to business profitability.
In the future, we can expect the underlying logic of social search to continue to play a role in determining how people and information related to each other. Using similar algorithms, we will be able to find commonalities among seemingly disparate groups of consumers and content, improving our ability to establish relevance between those that we market to and the information they seek.
Consumer targeting, content management, and overall web usability will benefit greatly as we learn.
Staff
There is an argument to be made that your relationships with your employees are the most important when it comes to the success of your business.
No matter how amazing you think you are the boss, your business will fail if your staff want it to. This is probably the thing I wish more managers understood.
People – your staff – are what make your company a success, and it has very little to do with you.
So next time you want to force overtime or stop some advantages, just remember that a staff member will hold onto every single little slight and will use it against you, whether it’s blabbing your secrets to competitors, messing with your software, or in extremely rare cases, destroying/stealing equipment. You seriously do not want a disgruntled employee.
Customers/Clients
The second most important (or first depending on how you look at it) is your relationship with your customers and clients.
Based on your business, you may not have a direct correlation with your clients and customers, but these are still the people that are making you rich, and if they get angered and look somewhere else because you were an insufferable idiot, then you’re going to look pretty stupid.
Luckily with this one, there are ways you can use software to get a better understanding of your customer base, which means they can then be manipulated.
For larger businesses running SAP, companies such as www.weaveability.com/sap-certified-b2b-portals provide applications that are SAP-certified to help utilize master data in an omnichannel environment. This is invaluable ammo in your ‘squeeze the customer of all their money’ gun.
Suppliers
This one isn’t 100% vital as there will always be more suppliers, however maintaining a healthy relationship with a select few vendors who you use regularly, will be mutually beneficial.
If you get on well with them and keep things rosy, then you will buy more which will give them incentives to reduce prices and give you deals, which then leads to you buying more, etc. It’s the perfect never-ending circle.
Wife or Husband
I lied; this is an important part of running a business, surprisingly. I don’t just mean your spouse, either, as it extends to your entire family.
Keeping a happy family life will mean you come to work every day knowing you’re working for the success of something more important than financial reward and success.
You’re trying to keep your family happy and comfortable, to ensure a good relationship with them and you will flourish as a business leader.
The bottom line
Remember one simple thing here: all companies need to view themselves as relationship builders, period. Customer service actions that are remarkable get talked about.
And getting mentioned in this light is a great thing, right? No question.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your customer attention and focus. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And this struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And this struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas to make your customer experiences better.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on a business process from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Change Management Case Study… 7 Volatile Challenges to Overcome
Business Blog … Learning from the Best Examples
The Business Intelligence Process Part 4 SWOT Analysis
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
The Cheat Sheet on Secrets of Collaboration and Co-Creation
Secrets of collaboration and co-creation? Well maybe just not well known.
We are great believers that collaboration and co-creation among businesses and between companies and customers hold much promise for future growth. There is an opportunity for collaboration and co-creation all along a companies’ value chain, whether it be customers, other businesses or suppliers.
The notion of a lone genius has always been a myth. As W. Brian Arthur observed in The Nature of Technology, innovations are combinations, so it is unlikely that anyone ever has all the pieces to the puzzle. Even Steve Jobs depended on a small circle of loyalists. Today, however, the ability to collaborate is becoming a key competitive advantage.
Here is a short great video explaining the importance of collaboration.
Let’s examine some examples along the value chain.
Customers
There’s plenty of research showing that under the right circumstances and conditions customers and users can develop innovations which are both novel and have greater value for the users that what the company’s own developers come up with. Still, there hasn’t been overwhelming agreement on how best to get it done.
A recent study by Anders Gustafsson at BI Norwegian Business School and Karlstad University in Sweden demonstrates that profitable co-creation with customers centers on the nature of the communication and interaction between the company and its customers. The researchers were after answers to two questions: How should companies communicate with their customers? When is it profitable to listen to what they say?
They tested four hypotheses:
First, customer co-creation characterized by high-frequency communication will lead to increased product and market success.
Second, because companies often take an overly dominating role, a more evenly distributed dialogue will lead to more beneficial outcomes of an innovation process.
Third, that collaborative process of face-to-face communication and openness in critical aspects of a project will facilitate the successful development of future services and products.
Finally, new offerings will be more successful if they account for needs that have been identified from user experiences.
The researchers conducted a survey among 334 managers who all had experience with innovation to create new products and services. They selected 284 real development projects that they divided into two main groups:
207 of the projects dealt with minor improvements of products or services, while the remaining 77 projects dealt with the development of radically new products or services not previously known to the market.
The study confirms that companies can achieve better results in new product development if customers are given the right pre-requisites for participating actively in the company’s development processes. Better results were defined as enhanced creativity, improved user value, and a more successful launch.
Listening
No big surprise here. For minor improvements to products and services, it is advantageous to talk frequently with the customers and have two-way communication between the company and customers.
The researchers also saw that it’s wise to listen carefully to what the customers actually said. Users will often know better what is needed to make them even more satisfied with products and services. Customers will also be able to tell you what types of improvements they are willing to pay for.
When not to listen
When a company aims to develop a product or service entirely new to the market, on the other hand, you should not listen too much to the customers’ specific proposals. The researchers saw that companies that listened too much to what customers said were less successful with radical innovations than those which placed less emphasis on the contents of conversations.
“The customers base themselves to a great extent on previous experiences. The really radical solutions are difficult to imagine in advance based on experiences with current products,” Gustafsson points out.
Sounds a bit like Henry Ford’s famous century-old quote:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
And no survey was needed on that thought, was there?
Other Businesses
Here is a great business to business collaboration and co-creation example that was derived from a common objective of sustainability of product containers. In 2009, The Coca-Cola Company created the Plant- bottle, a plastic bottle partially manufactured (30%) with plant-derived materials (like sugar cane and molasses) and byproducts of sugar production in Brazil.
These plants were chosen based on environmental criteria to ensure that they do not interfere with local crops. The remaining 70% of each bottle is made with materials derived from fossil fuels, such as petroleum.
The Coca-Cola Company is now striving to manufacture a bottle made of 100% plant-derived materials and plant residues. In fact, they have already developed a prototype, and are now collaborating with Heinz to use their bottling factory. The Coca- Cola Company has planned to invest $150 million in Plant BottleTM, to develop the next generation of technology for extracting sugar from plant residues such as plant stems, tree bark, and fruit peel.
It is also working to make the new container water and carbon neutral. Heinz has made a major investment in the project, although the company has not revealed any details. It is hoping to take a step further towards its own goal of reducing emissions, waste and energy consumption by 20% by 2015.
Heinz had already used 120 million PlantBottlesTM in the USA in 2011. The material in these new containers shares many properties with that of the original plastic (PET): it is amenable to carbonation of the liquid contained; recyclable; weighs the same; has the same life-time; shares the same appearance and chemical composition; and is suitable for water, juice and carbonated beverages.
The bottle is 100% recyclable: the resulting byproducts can be re-used to manufacture more bottles or to make other products, such as furniture or clothing. More opportunities for collaboration and co-creation. For example, The Coca-Cola Company and furniture maker Emeco have established a smart collaboration to manufacture the Emeco 111 Navy Chair, a chair made of 111 recycled bottles.
Where there are a need and a will of partner collaboration, companies will find a way.
Suppliers
Is growing the pie via supplier collaboration an impossible task? No, quite the opposite. But you have to collaborate more upfront on strategies. And finding an equally willing partner.
Consider one example. Over the last five years, Jimmy Dean’s has expanded its frame of reference beyond just breakfast sausage into convenient breakfast meals that provide longer-lasting energy. A great collaboration with its food manufacturer.
This niche partnership delivers a breakfast like what you’d get at a fast-food restaurant with sausage at its center. In that time, Jimmy Dean’s tripled its frozen breakfast sales with triple-digit millions in growth. But the business category overall grew from $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion, with Jimmy Dean’s driving nearly two-thirds of all the growth.
It’s a great example of what can happen when companies and their supplier bases stop fighting over splitting the pie and instead find a way to increase the share. In this case, the growth was stealing sales that might otherwise have gone to fast food establishments.
We offer these additional collaboration or co-creation recommendations that are independent of the partner type you are collaborating with (from the Art of Innovation by Tom Kelly):
Shoot the bad ideas first
Study the things you know won’t work. They will help you understand why they don’t work and give you more alternative options.
Have a bias for action
Move to implement experimentation with your best ideas as soon as possible. The mere process of actualizing will create more ideas and thoughts on solutions.
Use lots of media
Try as many types of media as possible to explore your prototype options. Examples include drawings, graphics, foam … any means to learn quickly.
Iterate often
Create short feedback loops. Don’t go long without experimenting and testing your ideas.
Expect your design to change
Rarely does your first prototype become your final design.
Remember this, if you are as impatient as I am, look to your colleagues, your friends, your customers, other businesses, and to suppliers to challenge you to reach new heights. Tap into the parts of your brain you may not use every day. The parts of your brain you may not even realize you can tap into.
Most of all, reach out to others to collaborate. The sum of group collaboration is always greater than the work of each individual.
The bottom line
So in the future, we will all need to learn how to collaborate with machines much as pilots do. In effect, rather than depend solely on our personal databases of experience, we will apply the sum total of human knowledge to our everyday and professional tasks.
Do you have any comments, questions, or experiences on collaboration to share with this community?
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
- The Nine Most Valuable Secrets of Writing Effective Copy
- How Good Is your Learning from Failure?
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Collaboration: The Cheat Sheet of Great Secrets on Co-Creation
Ken Sawyer once said: Collaboration drives creativity because innovation always emerges from a series of sparks … never a single flash of insight. Collaboration and co-creation secrets? Well, maybe just not well known.
Check out our thoughts on team leverage.
We are great believers that collaboration and co-creation among businesses and between companies and customers hold much promise for future growth.
There is an opportunity for collaboration and co-creation all along a companies’ value chain, whether it be customers, other businesses or suppliers.
Let’s examine some examples along the value chain.
Collaboration … working with customers
There’s plenty of research showing that under the right circumstances and conditions customers and users can develop innovations which are both novel and have greater value for the users that what the company’s own developers come up with.
Still, there hasn’t been overwhelming agreement on how best to get it done.
A recent study by Anders Gustafsson at BI Norwegian Business School and Karlstad University in Sweden demonstrates that profitable co-creation with customers centers on the nature of the communication and interaction between the company and its customers.
The researchers were after answers to two questions: How should companies communicate with their customers? When is it profitable to listen to what they say?
They tested four hypotheses:
First, that customer co-creation characterized by high-frequency communication will lead to increased product and market success.
Second, that because companies often take an overly dominating role, a more evenly distributed dialogue will lead to more beneficial outcomes of an innovation process.
Third, that collaborative process of face-to-face communication and openness in critical aspects of a project will facilitate successful development of future services and products.
Finally, that new offerings will be more successful if they account for needs that have been identified from user experiences.
The researchers conducted a survey of 334 managers who all had experience with innovation to create new products and services. They selected 284 real development projects that they divided into two main groups:
207 of the projects dealt with minor improvements of products or services, while the remaining 77 projects dealt with the development of radically new products or services not previously known to the market.
The study confirms that companies can achieve better results in new product development if customers are given the right pre-requisites for participating actively in the company’s development processes. Better results were defined as enhanced creativity, improved user value, and a more successful launch.
Related post: 10 Extraordinary Ways for Learning to Learn
Collaboration in the workplace … listening
No big surprise here. For minor improvements to products and services, it is advantageous to talk frequently with the customers and have two-way communication between the company and customers.
The researchers also saw that it’s wise to listen carefully to what the customers actually said. Users will often know better what is needed to make them even more satisfied with products and services.
Customers will also be able to tell you what types of improvements they are willing to pay for.
When not to listen
When a company aims to develop a product or service entirely new to the market, on the other hand, you should not listen too much to the customers’ specific proposals.
The researchers say that companies that listened too much to what customers said were less successful with radical innovations than those which placed less emphasis on the contents of conversations.
“The customers base themselves to a great extent on previous experiences. The really radical solutions are difficult to imagine in advance based on experiences with current products,” Gustafsson points out.
Sounds a bit like Henry Ford’s famous century-old quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” And no survey was needed on that thought, was there?
Collaboration examples … other Businesses
Here is a great business to business collaboration and co-creation example that was derived from a common objective of sustainability of product containers. In 2009, The Coca-Cola Company created the Plant- BottleTM, a plastic bottle partially manufactured (30%) with plant-derived materials (like sugar cane and molasses) and byproducts of sugar production in Brazil.
These plants were chosen based on environmental criteria to ensure that they do not interfere with local crops. The remaining 70% of each bottle is made with materials derived from fossil fuels, such as petroleum.
The Coca-Cola Company is now striving to manufacture a bottle made of 100% plant-derived materials and plant residues. In fact, they have already developed a prototype, and are now collaborating with Heinz to use their bottling factory. The Coca-Cola Company has planned to invest $150 million in Plant BottleTM, to develop the next generation of technology for extracting sugar from plant residues such as plant stems, tree bark, and fruit peel.
It is also working to make the new container water and carbon neutral. Heinz has made a major investment in the project, although the company has not revealed any details. It is hoping to take a step further towards its own goal of reducing emissions, waste and energy consumption by 20% by 2015.
Heinz had already used 120 million PlantBottlesTM in the USA in 2011. The material in these new containers shares many properties with that of the original plastic (PET): it is amenable to carbonation of the liquid container; recyclable; weighs the same; has the same lifetime; shares the same appearance and chemical composition; and is suitable for water, juice and carbonated beverages.
The bottle is 100% recyclable: the resulting byproducts can be re-used to manufacture more bottles or to make other products, such as furniture or clothing. More opportunities for collaboration and co-creation. For example, The Coca-Cola Company and furniture maker Emeco have established a smart collaboration to manufacture the Emeco 111 Navy Chair, a chair made of 111 recycled bottles.
Where there are a need and a will of partner collaboration, companies will find a way.
Suppliers
Is growing the pie via supplier collaboration an impossible task? No, quite the opposite. But you have to collaborate more upfront on strategies. And finding an equally willing partner.
Consider one example. Over the last five years, Jimmy Dean’s has expanded its frame of reference beyond just breakfast sausage into convenient breakfast meals that provide longer lasting energy. A great collaboration with its food manufacturer.
This niche partnership delivers a breakfast like what you’d get at a fast-food restaurant with sausage at its center. In that time, Jimmy Dean’s tripled its frozen breakfast sales with triple-digit millions in growth. But the business category overall grew from $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion, with Jimmy Dean’s driving nearly two-thirds of all the growth.
It’s a great example of what can happen when companies and their supplier bases stop fighting over splitting the pie and instead find a way to increase the share. In this case, the growth was stealing sales that might otherwise have gone to fast food establishments.
We offer these additional collaboration or co-creation recommendations that are independent of the partner type you are collaborating with (from the Art of Innovation by Tom Kelly):
Shoot the bad ideas first
Study the things you know won’t work. They will help you understand why they don’t work and give you more alternative options.
Have a bias for action
Move to implement experimentation with your best ideas as soon as possible. The mere process of actualizing will create more ideas and thoughts on solutions.
Use lots of media
Try as many types of media as possible to explore your prototype options. Examples include drawings, graphics, foam … any means to learn quickly.
Iterate often
Create short feedback loops. Don’t go long without experimenting and testing your ideas.