“You can play some interesting tricks with Pareto's rule.”
Assuming you
only did the 20% most productive tasks next week. Your productivity would be 400%
but your production would
only be 80% of its starting value. By
applying the same rule repeatedly you could achieve similar status to the proverbial professor who ' learned more and more about less and
less until finally he knew everything about bugger all!' .
While this is a great reply please don’t be distracted from the law of 80/20. These examples may cheer you up or not......
80% of people die from 20% of the most common causes.
80% of your headaches come from 20% of your worst customers. I think we are nearer to 95/5.
Let’s leave that idea alone for a moment as I would like to take swipe at Marketing. My ankle is getting better but I am beginning to get stir crazy. So let me tell you a story....
Going back to my early days I worked for a large paper company. They were a big company with thousands of staff and millions of Turnover. They had 120 reps, 40 Sales Managers and 15 Branch managers, not to mention all the other staff working in the 20 paper mills. As well as this, they had marketing people that were employed to “back sell” each of the different paper mills products. This often proved less than helpful as the idea was to make a profit. Two points here, if you couldn’t get a job selling at the front line, because you were too scared to go and see customers, you could always get one of these “soft” jobs. This meant resulted in engendering a feeling of resentment amongst true sales force towards those pathetic idiots in Marketing who were being paid without having to hit targets. The second problem was these reps weren’t able to tell us which paper from which mill returned the best profit margin. So as Salesmen we had to ignore their message as it was of no use to us at all. In other words marketing was a drain on the company.
I am glad to say nothing I have read or experienced has been able to change my complete contempt for anything labelled marketing. Oh I am enjoying this, getting all my venom flowing for these feckless people in a fraudulent industry.
To cap it all, we had a module on the part time degree course I went on, mentioned earlier, called Marketing.
Can you image the blood thirsty thoughts I had brewing at the very start of this? Well I was not disappointed; our lecturer had taken an extended holiday on the end of the summer break, they do have such a tough time having to make do with just 8 weeks summer holidays, and in doing so had forgotten to change the course assignment details from the year before. This meant that the first 4 weeks of a 10 week module was spent trying to work with literature that didn’t match the course notes, with a temporary lecturer that had never covered this type of course.
The responsible Lecturer eventually turned up and came in to face the music, he was genuinely bewildered and then deflated by some of the tough comments put forward by some of his annoyed adult students. He left and never returned. The only shame is these useless creatures will never get sacked by their colleges, as the college administrators have their hands tied by trade unions (another institution that has come to my notice over the years and will not get off lightly). Why would any school or college take on a member of the NUT, surely there is a clue in the name?
Having got that off my chest, the principle of finding out what companies/people want, and what are our potential customers prepared to pay for these products is vitally important to all of us. We have looked at (and taken on board) the premise that innovation is the one way we know that will get us ahead, on the proviso we know that this innovation is relevant and that our customers or potential customers will want it. This comes under market research.
We don’t work in huge conglomerates with massive marketing budgets. Let them waste their money; we need to be a lot more careful with our precious hard earned cash. So how can we make sure what we spend will work. Forget Branding, Market place presence and other useless catch phrases. Here are the three simple words we need to think about:-
RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)
Put simply, we are here to make money. And we only have our own hard earned cash to use, so don’t set aside a marketing budget; remember there are plenty of these feckless idiots and charlatans ready to squander your money. It won’t be easy. My old rowing coach would bellow through his mega phone “nothing great is ever easy” when we started to flag after an hour and a half of rowing at steady state (90/95% max heart rate).
Only venture what you can measure. Direct marketing can be measured by spending a certain amount on direct mail shots with a return card. This will work for some enterprises, but does need a lot of thought. Is your business the kind that would benefit from this approach? Do you make specific products, do you know who to target and what will they respond to? These are tried and tested, quite effective, a little dated but can be measured.
What about using the World Wide Web?! I can just imagine Rob Brydon’s raised eye brows as this gob-smacking thought hits him, as if he is the first one to think it (Gavin & Stacey.2008)
Sorry this is going on a bit so in the tradition of a Charles Dickens' instalment I will continue next week.
Nothing to add about the mad house elf, he is getting away with it, so far. The Tar Tars don’t like the Russians and don’t have a history of surrendering.
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