Buyer Process Maps

Buyer Process Maps captures the Buyer's Journey

Weekend Reading

• Why Management Consulting Will Be Disrupted: Part 2
• Why  Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders
• How US Department of Veteran Affairs Transformed IT
• 7 Paradoxical Sales Principles
• How India Got Its Funk
• Stop Judging and Start Learning

Business Performance Framework

Credit: Gartner

My popular post on Digital Transformation 

Weekend Reading

• Easy Credit Dries Up, Choking Growth in China - NYTimes.com
• IT Doesn't Matter (to CEOs)
• iOS vs. Android: What App Platform Should I Choose?
• Sales Manager or Sales Leader: Which are You?
• Why Management Consulting Will Be Disrupted: Part 1
• The Key to Happy Relationships? It’s Not All About Communication

Running IT as a Business

A great slide on Benchmarking  IT spend averages across the industry

Source : Gartner.com

 Source : Forrester.com

What is Value Management

Australian Mining Boom Impacts And Prospects

Is Your Business Ready for Big Data

IT Services Model - Cloud Enablement

Australian IT Industry Growth and Competitive Snapshot 2013-2014

Aussie banks to start rolling out real-time payments by next year

With the Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA), the banks - including ANZ, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, Citi, CBA, Cuscal, NAB, and Westpac - submitted this attached to make this happen in February. KPMG has won a competitive tender to become programme manager, the plan now is to put out a request for tender next year, and selection of the key elements of the operating system.

What happens when Coles keeps prices down

A fantastic speech By - Ian McLeod, Coles Managing Director, "What happens when Coles keeps prices down?”. Transcript below, its a good read.

Digital Transformation - Update

Digital Transformation - Sweet Spot

 Different organisation require different approach for leveraging benefits from digital transformation in their evolution.

• Pure Digitisation leads to expansion of core business to digital platforms.
• Pure Transformation leads to change in traditional business model to a new type of business model.
• Combination of executing Digitisation (services and platforms) and Business Transformation (transforming culture and business model) in parallel is less agile and is a challenging task to achieve. However this is the best option, executing either option individually or sequentially will not give the desired outcome.

Post NBN Industries in Australia

Why Telcos are Endangered Species - 2012

 

Interview with Brad Howarth - Australian Innovation and Startups Landscape

As part of our ongoing interviews with CEO's, Media Personalities, Philanthropists, and VC’s, to gauge the innovation and startups landscape in Australia, today we showcase our interview with Freelance Journalist, Public Speaker Mr Brad Howarth, who writes on Australia’s startup industry, digital marketing, dangers of climate change and other relevant topics in this domain.

This is what Brad has to say in a detailed interview with me. Read it here

Digital Transformation - Redefining Industries

In the ongoing pursuit of exploring how our world is becoming Digitally Transformed and how this is going to impact every industry, I have outlined the following agenda for a view point and a book that is still in the exploration stage.

The following agenda outlines the scope for me to explore, write and share my rumblings. I'm keen to get some thoughts and feedback. So please don't hesitate to reach out to me.

Update: Updated work on this topic is here

Mobile Megatrends 2012

 

10 Myths about the Mobile Economy

10+1 myths about the mobile economy

Troubled Telco's

When 7 out of top 12 Telco's are in zone of trouble, then its easy to make out that industry has some challenges to tackle.

GFC - 2 In Making..

This is what forthcoming GFC - II is about in a single snapshot.

Internet Trends 2011 by Mary Meeker, Partner at KPCB

KPCB Internet Trends 2011

View more presentations from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

How to Qualify Sales Lead and forecast Sales Target

Sharing my thoughts on how to qualify leads and forecast target.

Over the years, I have successfully used the BANT framework across the Waterfall Model of Funnel.



Let's look at the stages of

• Stage 0 (Demand Generation)
• Inquiry  - via a demand generation campaign like email/social media/webinar etc. or a sales rep. driven
• I'm not sure how you have got these 22 leads.
• From here, 22 prospects needs to be qualified along with 3 existing qualified leads to be sure.

• Stage 1 (Lead Management)
• Awareness - customer says do I have a problem, root problem /or a symptom of a problem
• Exit criteria - Marketing Captured Lead (MCL) which is data requests like  decisions makers, address, email, employees and other details of an organisation
  
• Stage 2 (Lead Management)
• Consideration - mean buyers say I have a problem and a need
• Exit criteria - Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) -  BANT 1 can be used to exit to the next stage 
• Stage 3  (Lead Management)
  
• Engagement  - mapping buyers journey to engage and see if my solution can solve your problem and shall I try it
• Exit criteria  - Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) - Tactical exit criteria are BANT 2
• Stage 4 (Opportunity Management)
• Intent - Customer is ready to learn more about it
• Exit criteria - Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) - BANT 3 or 4
• Stage 5
• Sales Opportunity is qualified and identified
• It's at this stage, sales rep starts his/her efforts

This process can take some time depending upon how much info (like personas and 360 deg  profile of customer) we have, but if we have most of it then, it's a 1-2 day exercise only.

By Stage 5, it will be interesting to see how leads/prospects qualify as an Opportunity. Also, funnel mix needs to be considered esp; how many opportunities are cross/up-sells and how many are new opportunities. 

This will also give a good indication at this stage whether forecasted numbers can be achieved or not.  This process will help to invalidate. Both bottom-up and top-down approach must be used for validation of forecast.

Since I don't know

• how many leads qualify for Stage 5
  
• what is  a typical size ($TCV) of a deal
• an average time of conversion from Stage 5 onwards  to close
• Conversion ratio (say 25%)

But if we know these 4 parameters, then the sales number can be forecasted with certainty.

Strategic Analysis - Facebook

Facebook Strategy Analysis - (2004 - 2011)

Thoughts For Nike Strategy - 2010

Cloud Computing For Enterprise IT

Cloud Computing