6 Steps to Build an Online Business

When building an online business, these are key steps to consider.

1. Build the site
2. Develop Content: editorial, user generated, vendor provided, automated
3. Drive Traffic: search, social media, link building, etc.
4. Generate Conversions
5. Monetize
6. Scale

Posted on February 17, 2011 at 2:14 pm by Peter · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Uncategorized

Drupal vs. Joomla vs. WordPress

Which to use all depends on your requirements.  The below thoughts may, or may not, take your requirements into consideration and certainly require the use of extensions/plug-ins/modules.  Your mileage may vary.  Religious wars abound on this topic.

Drupal:

Joomla:

WordPress:

All can (often through extensions):

Conclusions:

All are good choices – but not all are good choices for every job.  Note that there is a risk that WordPresses increasing capabilities will squeeze Joomla from the bottom, and Drupal’s improved ease of use will squeeze Joomla from the top.

Other good articles on this topic:

Posted on February 13, 2011 at 9:09 am by Peter · Permalink · One Comment
In: Uncategorized

BANT is dead?

No, it’s not dead, but it sure is mis-used. Which made me think for a few minutes that it was dead.

If you’re not familiar, the traditional way to qualify a hot lead is to check whether the person you are speaking to has Budget approved, Authority to make the decision, a Need for the solution and a Timeline in mind (shortened to BANT). These steps were defined by IBM many, many, many years ago.

I was recently on the receiving end of these questions (disguised of course) and I realized they were being mis-used. Here’s how I was responding:

Budget: More important than budget is ROI. If I have budget but can’t show ROI, I’m not going to approve it. If I don’t have budget but can show ROI, I’ll go get approval. We’re a smart business and we’ll do what makes sense to our bottom line.

Authority: Yes, I have authority. So does anyone else on my team that knows how to judge ROI and can build a business case. Regardless, we will have to get additional approvals when we’ve got a solid business case in place. There is virtually nothing in this company that is only approved by one person (think SOX requirements).

Need: If there is good ROI, I have a need. If not, I don’t have a need. Let’s have a collaborative discussion so that you can understand my pain points, and I can understand the key pain points your solution addresses, and we can jointly figure out whether there is a match between these two.

Timeline: High ROI means quick timeline. Low ROI means the project gets racked, stacked, and compared to many others. Each project is an opportunity cost, and I’m going to apply resources to the opportunities that drive the best ROI. You give me a 50% improvement in top line results and my timeline is “as fast as humanly possible”. You give me a 0.1% reduction in costs and I look at other projects and prioritize those that will give me the best ROI.

Is BANT dead? Probably not. But it is misapplied. How is it being misapplied?

The sales process has two parts.

The first part is typically defined as pre-sales or business development. It educates customers of their needs and the solutions to those needs. Think about the iPhone – nobody really knew they needed one until they got educated (very quickly) about its capabilities.

The second is the sales process itself. BANT is important here. When an organization has identified an opportunity that definitely has ROI, and is now looking for the best way to capture this ROI, the organization is further down the sales funnel. Using BANT can help identify how far down the funnel the customer has progressed.

BANT isn’t dead, but it’s certainly mis-applied when used during the pre-sales or business development process. Using it helps understand whether a prospect is closer to closing, but not whether the prospect is good or not (unless you only define a good prospect as one that will close quickly).

Sales guys – if you want to close quickly, show me the money first (ROI) and then worry about BANT.

Posted on March 15, 2009 at 4:45 am by Peter · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Management, Sales

So you’re a manager. You don’t know what your team does. Now what?

In the old days it was easier.  You actually understood all of the work your team was responsible for completing.  No more.  Many managerial roles require managing without understanding the details.  Whether it’s a CIO that can’t do database tuning, or a General that can’t operate an anti-tank weapon, managers do not know how to complete all their subordinates tasks.  Nor should they.

Unfortunately, most people are promoted into managerial roles because of their proven ability to complete operational tasks.  They are uncomfortable without detailed operational knowledge and control.  And nobody tells new managers that losing control is okay, that this discomfort is normal, and that they must change their operational style in order to be successful as a manager.  No longer can they dig into all execution details – just some of them, once in a while. 

So, what are the key areas a manager needs to focus on?  In my view, these include:

1) Goal setting.

The manager needs to move from defining tasks to defining business goals.  His teams (or departments) need to identify the tasks or activities that they feel will most effectively reach these goals. In some cases, individual teams may need to check-in with the manager on the proposed tasks to make sure they fit within corporate strategy.

2) Managing Human Resources

a. Selecting the right people. Each person has different interests and skills, and these need to intersect with the company’s goals and direction. If there is a mismatch, identify it early and correct it. Senior management roles are often lonely because of the need to make these brutal calls.

b. Motivating them.

i. The Individual. People are generally motivated by some combination of money, who they are working with, or what they are doing.  Understanding an individual’s interests and structuring a job around these interests is key.  And, focus on aligning personnel assignments with strengths.  You wouldn’t go off putting Michael Jordan on a synchronized swimming team to improve those skills, now would you? 

ii. The Team.  More often than not, internal issues are more likely to stifle a team’s ability to move forward than the external environment.  Whether it is politics, undisciplined processes, or overly bureaucratic processes, the manager needs to identify the problem, assess how to resolve the situation, and put fixes in place, and get each team (or department) operating efficiently.

c. Developing them. You can set goals, but if the team isn’t educated on how to reach them, they’ll fail. If you can’t hire expertise from the outside, you’ll have to build it inside. Search Engine Optimization is a good example. You can give someone goals they need to achieve, but if you don’t complement those goals with education, risk goes up. Put your team members in the path of success by investing in education for them – even if it’s only a couple books and webinars.

3) Allocating Resources (personnel and capital).  Or, in today’s economic climate, Husbanding Resources

a) Time and Money. Time and money need to be allocated and invested to achieve the above business goals. The manager needs to work one or two levels of abstraction higher than his team in allocating resources. While a trade show manager may think about “which trade shows should we attend”, the marketing manager may think about “should we allocate marketing resources to trade shows or search engine optimization” and the CEO will be thinking “should we allocate resources to sales, marketing, or product development”.

b) Tools.  Managers need to recognize the types of tools (I like that word better than capital) their teams need in order to achieve business goals.  Better yet, give your team tools that lets them be more operationally efficient that your competitors and gain some competitive advantage while you’re at it.  In an online world, this can include measurement tools (business analytics), content management tools (to accelerate release cycles) or email dispatch tools (to improve site retention). Identify the mix of tools you need, the business benefits each tool can help provide, and move toward prioritizing the high value tools your team needs.

As you move into more senior roles, each of the above has a longer time horizon.  After all, getting infrastructure in place that will allow a team to be more efficient takes more time than changing the copy on a marketing campaign to improve its results.  While both are important, a more senior manager should be focusing on the former, and ensuring the right person is in place for delegating the latter. 

This is not to say that managers should stay away from all details.  The best managers are able to identify key or critical operational areas and then dig in and ask the questions necessary to conclude whether the operation is being run appropriately (or bring in a consultant to do so).  This enables them to make any changes necessary (likely to business goals, personnel or resource allocation) to improve results.  But a manager can’t know everything about all the processes he is responsible for.   Nor should he.

Posted on March 15, 2009 at 4:32 am by Peter · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Management

Learning, Sharing and Remembering for Faster Business Success

Every year we have to do more with less…welcome to the industrial revolution…  But pure execution won’t always get you the improvement you need.  And why spend so much energy re-executing the same tasks someone else already executed, only to learn the same lessons they already learned?  Organizations have an incredible amount of untapped information, knowledge and wisdom.  To better mine this valuable internal resource, an organization needs to think about how it will support the three key phases of learning, sharing and remembering. 

In online marketing, one limitation to getting smarter faster is the access to good information about what works and what doesn’t work.  Especially with something like search engine optimization, but also in other areas like conversions, view rates, click through rates, conversion rates, SEO, PPC, display, behavioural marketing, social, mobile, ROI or some other action (or fad). How can we make sure that what we are learn gets shared so that others in the organization can leverage the hard earned knowledge to make better business decisions and to make these decisions faster?  How can we make sure we’ve spent the right amount of time figuring out what others have learned before we invest our own time?  It’s one thing for a single tactical worker to learn whether some tactic works. It’s even more powerful when that lesson can be shared with other workers, who then leverage or incorporate that tactic into their activities, whether now or in the future.

For our online development efforts, we’ve evolved toward a reasonably good process that balances time invested with knowledge gained. 

Learning

We start when the idea is hatched.  When proposing a new idea, we ask folks to explain the idea and estimate its business benefits, often using a short powerpoint. These points covered typically include (skip steps 1 and 2 if it is a brand new idea – like the first time you are testing social network advertising):

1) What is currently being done?  (What does the email/web page/etc. look like now?)

2) What are our current results? 

3) What is your hypothesis about current problems or opportunities for improvement?

4) What changes are you recommending to address the problems or opportunities?  (What changes to the email/web page/etc. are you proposing?) 

5) What results do you predict or expect from these changes?

A pre-requisite is to have measurement tools that can baseline initial results.  It’s management’s responsibility to get these in place.  It’s then important to also have well thought out measurements that are largely isolated and immune from other changes in the environment.

You must continue working on the project even after it has launched.  Committing to doing some kind of post launch review and analysis is where many organizations fall down. They are so busy that immediately after launching a new change, resources are moved onto the next project, without ever measuring the results of the previous project.  People at this kind of organization develop the operational skills to launch projects, but don’t develop the experiential knowledge to predict business ROI.  This knowledge is a critical prerequisite for the even more important managerial skill of prioritizing projects. 

So, after launching a new idea, you must add the following points:

6) What are the actual results: these may include metrics beyond those measured above, especially if the change caused unexpected consequences, either good or bad

7) What are the lessons learned: the key here is not the what, but the why. This is where scientific measurement of results needs to be complemented with deeper insights into the user intent and user psychology that drove those results. Some may suggest just doing lots of A/B or MVT testing, but without insight into user intent, you may only find what my calculus class called local maximums. By understanding intent, you’ll be able to find the one or two variables you really need to adjust to maximize results, and you’ll understand how results from one specific situation may be applicable to a broader variety of situations.

Interestingly, consultants should be in the best position to put together such lessons learned.  Consultants work on so many different projects and have access to so many results, they are in an ideal position to husband a wealth of knowledge, and then leverage it during pitches and engagements with clients. By successfully building such a knowledge base in a way that doesn’t breach client confidentiality, they’d be in a great position to base recommendations more heavily on real world experience and results, and less on individual gut feel. 

Of course, individual companies can do the same thing.

Learning challenges

There are a number of challenges to this process.

First, you need people to have a high enough level of maturity to say “this didn’t work”. This requires a corporate culture that rewards risk taking and understands that to get the big wins, you may need to fail early and fail fast along the way. Just as importantly, the culture needs to focus on what was learned and look forward, rather than searching for the guilty, placing blame and looking backward. Go too far in the wrong direction though, and you’ll find the only thing you do is fail early and fast and often. You need to be smart enough to move the odds of success in your favor, and risk tolerant enough to know that you’ll take some losses along the way. 

Second, you’re likely to be making many changes at once, and it can be difficult to isolate which changes worked and which didn’t.  This has the advantage of getting many ideas out at once, with the added difficulty of understanding results.  The alternative is to make single changes in a very controlled manner, which often delays getting a long list of good ideas to market.  Each organization needs to decide how to balance these two issues.  In some cases, like Amazon’s continuous multi-variate testing, you can learn fast and make many changes at the same time.  The underlying math does require a high volume of test cases (page views and conversions, in Amazon’s case).  So lower volume conversion pages will take longer to judge.

Third, you need to keep the process lite.  Give folks a template and access to the tools to get numbers.  Build the steps into the project approval process.  Take as much pain out of the process as possible.  Or else they won’t do it. 

Sharing

Learned lessons builds the individual.  Sharing those lessons builds the organization.  Several options here.  Email or RSS distribution of lessons learned is quick and easy, but may not result in successful sharing if it’s not read; like any marketing piece, the lessons learned need to come with a catchy title, a teaser, and be sent to a targeted and interested audience.  A light meeting every several weeks to quickly run through new lessons learned can also be used for somewhat more formal sharing (with the side benefit of devoloping peoples speaking and presentation skills).  

Remembering

This is by far, the most difficult step for most organizations, usually because the information and knowledge isn’t documented in the first place.  But once it’s documented, most of the hard work has been done.  All you then need is an easy to use tool with access control, search capabilities and probably version control, and you have your knowledge management repository – now sometimes called a wiki.  Much better than storing everything on a shared drive.  Interestingly, geographically distributed organizations have an advantage in storing institutional knowledge because they rely on written communication more heavily, often on shared whiteboards or wikis, which then become an important foundation for such a repository.  Traditional organizations rely more on verbal communications, which is more ephemeral, and makes it more difficult to get information documented.  Getting these lessons stored and accessible makes them available for the next person attacking a similar problem. 

The ROI

Structuring your team to foster learning, sharing and remembering can massively reduce the learning curve of new team members and have them contributing at a much higher level much earlier in their tenure.  Sure, the knowledge may be book learned instead of experiential.  But, better to start with strong book knowledge and build experiential knowledge on top of it, than to start with more limited knowledge and pay in blood, sweat and tears get to the same level through experiential knowledge.  Finding the right balance in the above steps can yield some good ROI – reducing labor costs and accelerating the productivity of that labor. 

Posted on November 5, 2008 at 3:18 pm by Peter · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Development, learning, Management

Developing talent: critical thinking skills

How do you develop a young, new hire to quickly take on increasing levels of responsibility?  In order to do this, I find myself consistently developing critical thinking skills.  I want to watch folks move from conversations that start with “what should I do” or “we should just do this” to “this is the problem, these are our options, these are the advantages and disadvantages of each option, and this is what I recommend”.  I’ve found that when I can develop these critical thinking skills, I can justify promoting folks (which makes them happy) and my work load goes down (which makes me happy).   Oh, and my bosses appreciate it when I take this same approach with them. 

To develop these skills, these are the stages I take our junior folks through. 

1) Build functional knowledge:  The first step is to ensure folks understand how to functionally execute their job.  For most roles, this is typically through some kind of on-the-job training.  Pretty straight forward, not much to be said here (except that it’s also good to have your processes documented – different post). 

2) Measure results:  In every functional area, there is the opportunity for folks to measure the results of their work.  This should be a mix of both quantity and quality measurements in order to avoid too great a focus on one or the other.  For example, a customer services team can be measured by both number of responses handled per hour and average rating of responses.  An email marketing team can be measured by both number of conversions and conversion rates.  Focusing on just one will typically be to the detriment of the other. 

A key management role is to help get the infrastructure in place to generate or baseline these measures.  With measurements in place, I watch to see when people start refering to these measures and business outcomes. 

3) Identify problems or opportunities for improvement:  Having an understanding of functional processes, and access to the results being delivered, folks can start seeing what is working, what is not working, and what can work better.  I’m looking for folks to identify these areas.

An inquisitive comment like ”Wow, did you know that we only have a 60% conversion rate on our confirmation emails?” is a good indicator of development potential.  Or, to spur this thinking, I ask what key conclusions can be drawn from the measures we’re looking at.

Another example, if 25% of customer services inbound emails are requesting new passwords, and that accounts for 10% of the customer service team’s time, we may have an opportunity to make changes that reduce the workload on the customer service team.  Or if the second page in a coversion flow only has a 60% conversion rate, we may be able to bring it up to 70%.  But, until you’ve identified these areas, you may be chasing the wrong areas.  What I’m looking to develop here is an ability to look at figures or results, and identify areas that can benefit from change.   

4) Identify options for addressing the problem/opportunity:  What I’m looking for here is a full range of options.  Many times folks will identify one option and think they are done.  It may not be the best option.  It may not be a complete solution for a problem that requires a more comprehensive approach.  For instance, there are many options for improving email conversion rates including resegmenting the target audience, improving inbox deliverability rates, adjusting email titles, adjusting the email’s content, and making changes to a landing page.  I want to see people grow into identifying a full range of options (including doing nothing).

5) Identify advantages and disadvantages of each option:  It’s important that folks can see both sides of an issue.  We don’t need religious fanatics.  For example, one advantage of focusing on a single development language, whether Java or php, is that you can focus on hiring and developing one skill set rather than two, which manages costs.  One disadvantage is that you may have less market flexibility, which may impact return.  The right answer is different for different organizations.  In an ideal world, the full range of advantages and disadvantages can be boiled down to costs and benefits.  Changing an email subject line is quick, easy, and (depending on where you are starting) can double view rates, resulting in some revenue improvement.  Improving email inbox deliverability is a more costly exercise and (depending on where you are starting) can take longer to show results.  I’m looking to develop folks into looking at the advantages and disadvantages of each option.

6) Make a recommendation:  Having gone through the above steps, I want to hear a recommendation.  The recommendation will generally be for the highest ROI option – otherwise known as the low hanging fruit.  Low cost, high return first.  High cost, low return last.  Others in the middle.  Generally, I find that when people go through the above process, conclusions and recommendations are pretty self evident.  Sometimes they’re not, and this is when some management judgement is required.  Surprisingly, I’ve seen people that are good at all of the previous steps, but then don’t have the confidence to, or don’t want to take the responsibility for, making a recommendation (future post on handling that situation). 

After agreeing on a recommendation, it’s back to step 1.  Go execute it. 

As a manager, it can be difficult to sit back and guide people through this process.  It takes two minutes to answer the question “What should we do” with “We should do this.”  It takes an hour to generate a discussion that goes through “What is the problem?  What are the options?  What are the advantages and disadvantages of each option?  What do you recommend?”  And also guiding the conversation to fill in any holes such as missing options or missing advantages or disadvantages. 

It can also be frustrating for a functional expert to be asked to share his thinking process.  But, that’s what consensus building is all about.  And that’s how a functional expert builds his credibility.  The vagaries of the SEO process means SEO “experts” generally have more trouble going through this kind of process, which actually makes it even more important that they go through such a process. 

In going through this conversation (and development), I’m looking to understand how someone thinks.  Do they think through all the options?  Are they confident in their analysis and recommendation?  Are they jumping to a recommendation too fast without having thought through the issues? 

I’m also assessing how I’m doing.  Have I helped provide access to all the information required to reach a good recommendation?  How has the person progressed since our last conversation, and where do I still need to help?

Some bonuses for successfuly developing folks: (i) delegation is a whole lot more comfortable when you know folks are going through this type of critical thinking process when making decisions, (ii) it becomes a lot easier to move toward results based management and (possibly most of all) (iii) it’s really rewarding to watch folks go through this development.

Posted on October 5, 2008 at 6:46 am by Peter · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Development