Look

The value of thinking is grossly overrated. It's easy to get caught up in "thinking" through problems in business or ideas but the value and application is limited. You need to look. Inspect and observe facts, statistics, operations. Observe what is happening and how and then collect applicable information that you can use and do something about. Look at how your sales reps are acting and speaking on the phone. Look at how your stat charts are trending week to week and month to month. Look at how your delivery or production team is actually doing their tasks at hand and just stand by to observe while they work. Then based on things you observe, make notes on items that need to be corrected and improved. By doing this, you will spot problems, bugged areas and non-optimum operations in plain sight. Now with this information, you can act on it and have workable solutions not based on thought but on real world facts.

Stop trying to think you way through problems to arrive at a solution because I promise, you will never arrive. You need to look and practice spotting the problems through intelligent observation. Then apply what you have learned to address the problem with practical solutions.

Walk around and look daily at every area of the company to observe, take note and correct. Anytime you start "thinking" just switch over to looking and begin to observe and you will find that the solution will flush out every time.

- Robert Cornish
CEO, Richter10.2 Media Group

Focus

The other day I was going through my Twitter feed and saw a tweet asking a question to Gurbaksh Chahal  (a very successful entrepreneur who sold his last company for $300MM and the one before it for $40MM) about whether he get's tempted to work on other ideas while he is working on a company. His response... "never. Focus is everything." 

To me one of the biggest elements of failure or simply lack of success lies in most people's lack of ability to stay focused. I'll admit, I love millions of ideas as well and have a tendency to daydream from time to time but being that I have owned four companies, I know the power of focused attention and the deadliness of distractions or dispersals. Focus is everything. 

If you know what your company stands for, sells and delivers and have clearly named out or defined your product or service and then defined your goal or vision the only next step for you to take is to do everything that is focused toward executing the goals to attain the vision. Do not get distracted and do not let any other "bright ideas" enter the equation. Focus your time, energy and effort on your goal. 

The analogy I would use is the one about chasing rabbits.... if you are trying to chase two rabbits at the same time, you'll end up with none but on the other hand if you select one to focus on and go after it, there's a good chance you will catch it. 

Don't try to be everything to everyone. Know what you do and who you are and do it well. Get focused and develop tunnel vision to work toward attaining your goals. Stomp out distractions the second they come up including any new bright ideas that "potentially could make a whole lot of money..." just focus and perfect what you are doing and do it well. That is the road to win. 

- Robert Cornish
CEO, Richter10.2 Media Group

Robert Cornish

Richter10.2 Media Group

Chief Executive Officer 

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Focus

The other day I was going through my Twitter feed and saw a tweet asking a question to Gurbaksh Chahal  (a very successful entrepreneur who sold his last company for $300MM and the one before it for $40MM) about whether he get's tempted to work on other ideas while he is working on a company. His response... "never. Focus is everything." 

To me one of the biggest elements of failure or simply lack of success lies in most people's lack of ability to stay focused. I'll admit, I love millions of ideas as well and have a tendency to daydream from time to time but being that I have owned four companies, I know the power of focused attention and the deadliness of distractions or dispersals. Focus is everything. 

If you know what your company stands for, sells and delivers and have clearly named out or defined your product or service and then defined your goal or vision the only next step for you to take is to do everything that is focused toward executing the goals to attain the vision. Do not get distracted and do not let any other "bright ideas" enter the equation. Focus your time, energy and effort on your goal. 

The analogy I would use is the one about chasing rabbits.... if you are trying to chase two rabbits at the same time, you'll end up with none but on the other hand if you select one to focus on and go after it, there's a good chance you will catch it. 

Don't try to be everything to everyone. Know what you do and who you are and do it well. Get focused and develop tunnel vision to work toward attaining your goals. Stomp out distractions the second they come up including any new bright ideas that "potentially could make a whole lot of money..." just focus and perfect what you are doing and do it well. That is the road to win. 

- Robert Cornish
CEO, Richter10.2 Media Group

Salespeople are Worthless Without a Sales Pipeline

While discussing the importance of talented salespeople with my partner this afternoon the conversation brought up the critical element of sales which is the step prior to sales that most people neglect - developing sales opportunities.

If you head to a local bookstore today, you'll find many books on selling, sales technique, sales motivation, best practices etc. but you will rarely find a book about successful methods for developing strong interest from the correct audience in order to create sales opportunities.

Having trained and competent salespeople is obviously vital for any company but don't neglect the sales prospecting actions to fill their pipeline. You can have the greatest salesperson in the world working for you but if you lack people to sell to, the salesperson is wasted. Focus a huge amount of your efforts on driving new prospective clients to your sales team so they can work their magic and do what they should be doing which is selling and closing new business. You can never have too much in the pipeline so jam it full of new prospects.

To drive the pipeline, you will need to focus on methods of reaching your target audience to cultivate strong interest for your sales team to sell and close and that is the secret ingredient ....

- Robert Cornish
CEO, Richter10.2 Media Group

Marketing People's Role

At our agency we frequently deal with marketing people (CMO's, VP's, Directors etc) related to our strategies due to the nature of our agencies services. Ultimately when the decision is made or during the negotiation we push to deal with the person in charge of business development or sales. Our agency exclusively deals with creating new relationships for our clients that measurably impact sales so we actually need to speak with and work with the people on the front-lines that sell the product or service.

This brings up the question of what marketing people's role actually is within any company. Since marketing people are not actually selling the product or service, it's crucially important to define roles and ensure that the roles don't bleed together.

Marketing's purpose is to create strategies that cultivate interest and create want for the product or service. From there, the business development team work to sell and close that interest or want with the goal of converting it into new revenue. While this seems very basic, it seems that the marketing people get involved in sales decisions and ideas related to sales that may or may not be applicable. This is generally a bad idea to involve your marketing people in sales related actions since they typically have little to no actual experience in sales.

Separate the two and keep your marketing people focused on effective campaigns and strategies that only produce interest and want for your product or service and then work with your business development team and VP Sales etc to actually take that "interest" or "want" to then sell and close it.

When the roles get confused, the outcome and results are poor in terms of effectiveness of the campaign. As long as you keep the roles focused, you will find that the marketing people produce better results to create interest and want and the sales team will then be able to focus on doing what they know to be workable to sell and close more business. Keep marketing and sales ideas, actions, decisions compartmentalized and focused then route the specific traffic to the correct areas.

For example:

(1) If you have a project for an email campaign, route this to your director of marketing to work out what should be promoted and how as well as what content will be in the email based on past results, survey's etc with the goal of cultivating interest and want for your sales team.

(2) Once you have the interest or want produced, immediately route that out of the hands of marketing and over to the VP Sales to direct to the sales team to handle with what they know best to do. The sales team can then focus on selling and closing the newly developed interest and want produced by marketing.

This sounds simplistic but the truth is that all too often I see marketing people still involved in step (2) as listed above which causes confusion and actually reduces the effectiveness of the campaign not to mention the chances of closing the sale.

Treat it like a relay race and know when to pass the baton as listed above and you'll find that the overall effectiveness of your campaigns will improve resulting in a better marketing to sales conversion rate.

- Robert Cornish
CEO, Richter10.2 Media Group