Seth's law of the little shovel

I found this nice little law on Seth Godin's blog about how to approach Sales and Marketing. If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.

If you walk around town with a little shovel, you'll just end up digging thousands of little holes, not one big one.

Call on one person ten times and you might make the sale. Call on ten people once each and you will likely get ten rejections.

The important thing to remember, says Seth, is that separate events are often separate. If you use the same ineffective approach on one thousand people, it's not going to start working better just because you use it more often.

Connected events, on the other hand, often benefit from frequency and trust.

Which leads to two viable strategies:

1. If you can stay still, stay still. Earn the trust, earn the sale by repeatedly demonstrating value and authority.

2. If you can't stay still, get a bigger shovel. Your marketing and your sales pitch has to be so refined and focused that it works the first time, because you don't get a second time.

In difficult times for service providers and in my case business consultants I found this little reminder very helpful. I'm off to buy a shovel.

Employee engagement critical to recession survival

Better employee engagement could do more for the success of UK businesses “than almost anything else” according to a new report by David MacLeod.



MacLeod writes that harnessing the full potential of employees would be crucial for surviving the recession and making the most of the upturn and that engagement was not simply about a survey, as many employers thought, but a “way of managing and thinking about people as human beings, not just human resources”.

According to CIPD research, only a third of British workers are fully engaged at work. The institute’s director of HR capability, Stephanie Bird, backed the report’s recommendations. “This report puts engagement where it properly belongs: at the heart of business performance. HR professionals will see this report as an endorsement of what many of them are already doing, as well as a stimulus to do more,”.

Well what a shock folks, happy employees = performing employees. I welcome this report as it gets people issues back in the news. However, I do find the endless regurgitation of this type of thing really annoying. Of course organisations want engaged people - so get on with it.

For more information on the report and for some thoughts on how to engage employees I suggest Jon Ingham's article on the subject. The report itself and some video of the author can be found here.

Keeping Top Employees in an Economic Downturn

While few average performing employees will consider leaving during a recession, new research shows that top performers can and will if they feel they are not being valued. The very strategy that some businesses employ to get through these hard times may to be blame, treating employees more like costs to be pared down than valuable assets to be held on to.

For the average employee, hanging on to a job will be top priority. This isn’t the case for those who are among the best and brightest at an organization. For them, many struggling companies simply don’t offer the challenges and the rewards that they need to feel valuable and successful. They also have the skills and ability to be highly desired elsewhere so there is less of a risk of winding up unemployed.

So is there anything you can do to keep these employees even if your business is struggling? After all, they may be pretty hard to replace if they do decide to leave. While in the end you can’t make the decision for them, you can give them fewer reasons to consider leaving at all by creating a workplace that helps them continue to develop their career, values their assistance in the decision-making process and recognizes them for work that is done well.

You also may benefit from being up front and honest and addressing any of their concerns when it comes to cutbacks, compensation and the company’s potential. Those workers who are truly invested in their jobs may see the struggle as a challenge that can help them cement their position in the company. Whatever you choose to do, make sure you’re not ignoring your best employees while watching out in for the bottom line as it could come back to hurt you later on.

This post was contributed by Megan Jones, who writes about the distance learning mba. She welcomes your feedback at Meg.Jones0310@gmail.com