"What a fabulous question"

"A reader asked, “Why isn’t pricing more valued in companies?” What a fabulous question. Although I haven’t seen the research, my experience leads me to believe there are three reasons, all huge.
.
First, many companies don’t know the power of pricing.
...
Second, executives may understand the power of pricing but don’t know how to tackle it.
...
Third, pricing is risky."

Acredito que muitos estarão com o mesmo modelo mental que me formatava quando eu chamava de burros a Marn e Rosiello quando afinal o burro era eu. Algumas empresas, conhecendo a minha veia para capturar e descrever modelos sistémicos com os esquemas da dinâmica de sistemas, costumam pedir-me para retratar problemas sistémicos, em busca de pontos de alavancagem. Como de alguma forma se pode intuir pelo tema da falta de pessoas para trabalhar, isto anda tudo relacionado com a incapacidade de perceber que existem outras formas de aumentar a rentabilidade para além da cancerosa aposta no aumento da quantidade.

Trechos retirados de "Why Isn’t Pricing More Valued in Companies?"

Para reflexão

"An earlier, smaller trial in Uganda had suggested that the psychological training was likely to work well. It did: monthly sales rose by 17% compared with the control group, while profits were up by 30%. It also boosted innovation: recipients came up with more new products than the control group. That suggests that entrepreneurship, or at least some mental habits useful for it, can indeed be taught. More surprising was how poorly the conventional training performed: as far as the researchers could tell, it had no effect at all. Budding entrepreneurs might want to avoid the business shelves and make for the psychology section."

Trechos retirados de "Psychology beats business training when it comes to entrepreneurship"

Fico com pena

Confesso que não tinha pensado nesta alternativa nas reflexões que tenho feito sobre a falta de pessoas para trabalhar:

• Têxtil de Guimarães com falta de portugueses constrói alojamento para trabalhadores do Bangladesh

Tenho de aceitar esta via como uma tentativa legítima para resolver um problema, tenho de ser fiel ao conselho que dou aos agricultores: a sua missão não é alimentar o mundo é ganhar a sua vida. Neste caso, a missão dos empresários têxteis não é fazer subir o sector na escala de valor, é tratar do seu problema, é satisfazer os clientes que resolveu servir. No entanto, fico com pena de não se aproveitar esta oportunidade para subir na escala de valor e abandonar a via do crescimento canceroso.

Acham mesmo?

"O que se torna evidente é que o “mercado livre de ideias”, que garante a possibilidade de “ideias de toda a espécie terem uma oportunidade de sair a público, de serem explicitadas e argumentadas até ao fim, e não de forma truncada”, está hoje de rastos."

O artigo que encontrei esta manhã no ionline, "Livrarias independentes. A brecha que persiste e a urgência de um leitor ativista", é merecedor de vários comentários relacionados com o pensamento estratégico nas organizações, com a determinação dos clientes-alvo, com o desenho ou a percepção do ecossistema em que se está inserido. No entanto, por agora fico-me só pela frase que destaquei lá em cima.

Acham mesmo que é mais difícil publicar ideias no mundo de hoje? Acham mesmo que as barreiras à publicação são mais altas hoje do que há 10 ou 20 anos?

Agora imaginem o modelo mental de alguém que responde "SIM" a ambas as questões a tentar explicar o encerramento das livrarias independentes.

Recordar:

• "Empreendedores literários";
• "Heranças"

Delicioso (parte II)

Parte I.

"This tendency to underestimate the complexity around us is now a well-studied aspect of human psychology and it is underpinned, in part, by the so-called narrative fallacy.
...
You see the narrative fallacy in operation when an economist pops up on the early-evening news and explains why the markets moved in a particular direction during the day. His arguments are often immaculately presented. They are intuitive and easy to follow. But they raise a question: Why, if the market movements are so easy to understand, was he unable to predict the market movement in advance? Why is he generally playing catch-up?
...
That is the power of the narrative fallacy. We are so eager to impose patterns upon what we see, so hardwired to provide explanations that we are capable of “explaining” opposite outcomes with the same cause without noticing the inconsistency.
...
But think about what this means in practice. If we view the world as simple, we are going to expect to understand it without the need for testing and learning. The narrative fallacy, in effect, biases us toward top-down rather than bottom-up. We are going to trust our hunches, our existing knowledge, and the stories that we tell ourselves about the problems we face, rather than testing our assumptions, seeing their flaws, and learning. But this tendency, in turn, changes the psychological dynamic of organizations and systems. The greatest difficulty that many people face, as we have seen, is in admitting to their personal failures, and thus learning from them. We have looked at cognitive dissonance, which becomes so severe that we often reframe, spin, and sometimes even edit out our mistakes.
...
But when we are misled into regarding the world as simpler than it really is, we not only resist testing our top-down strategies and assumptions, we also become more defensive when they are challenged by our peers or by the data. After all, if the world is simple, you would have to be pretty stupid not to understand it."

Isto faz lembrar Taleb e os fragilistas.

Trechos retirados de "Caixa Negra" de Matthew Syed.

"selecting target prospects "

"In some sales positions, the list of target prospects is supplied to the salesperson. However, in the majority of small and midsize companies, that’s not the case. Often, the challenging task of identifying and choosing potential clients is left to the salesperson. And that can be pretty daunting, particularly for a new hire.
.
I like to use a series of “who” and “why” questions to help identify strategic targets when creating a list:

• Who are our best customers (by industry, size, business model, location, etc.)?

• Why did they initially become customers? Why do they still buy from us?

• Who do we compete against in the marketplace?

• Why and when do they beat us? And why do prospects choose us over them?

• Who used to be our customers (said differently, who used to buy from us)?

• Why did we lose the business?

• Who almost became a customer but didn’t (deals where we came close but lost)?

• Who has referred business to us in the past?

• Who should be referring business to us?

As discussed previously, selecting target prospects is one of our few chances to be strategic. We need answers to these questions in order to create a confidence-inspiring list of smartly chosen prospects and referral sources. I’d go as far as saying that building a great list is easy once we have these answers and just about impossible without them.
First and foremost, I want to pursue prospects that look, feel, and smell like our very best clients. We know we bring value to the equation. We have instant credibility. Our story is relevant and we have happy clients to prove it."

Trecho retirado de "New Sales. Simplified" de Mike Weinberg.

Coisas que estão/vão mudar o contexto

No dia a dia, com cada vez mais frequência deparo com coisas que estão/vão mudar o contexto em que as empresas de calçado do futuro vão actuar.

Dois exemplos desta manhã:

1. She Could Have Been One of Tesla's Early Employees. She's Revolutionizing Manufacturing Instead;
2. This Biotech Company Is 3-D Printing Vegan Leather, and Fashion Companies Are Going Nuts

Acerca de 1:

• Uma vez que as pequenas séries estão para ficar, até que ponto máquinas muito mais pequenas podem fazer o serviço que vemos ser feito por máquinas de corte de grandes dimensões? Até que ponto estas "computer-controlled milling machine that can cut into aluminum, brass, wood, and plastic with incredible precision" pode substituir os cortantes e balancés?

Acerca de 2:

• Pode ser uma revolução potenciada por preços, questões ambientais e valores seguidos pelos consumidores.

O futuro já cá está, está é mal distribuído.

"committed to this defined list"

"A finite target list is essential for a successful new sales attack. Salespeople who succeed in acquiring new business lock in on a finite number of strategic targets. They’re confident these prospects have been chosen for the right reasons, and they methodically work and rework that finite set of accounts. Over time, these successful hunters get noticed, get in, build relationships, and begin gaining traction. This only happens because they have committed to this defined list and are therefore able to penetrate targets with their sales weapons."

Trecho retirado de "New Sales. Simplified" de Mike Weinberg

"Pain is more potent than pleasure"

"Pain is more potent than pleasure, and anxiety more than hope."

Ao ler esta ideia, relacionada com a aversão à perda, fiz logo a ponte para o diagrama de forças e:

Penso logo na experiência da minha primeira ida de camioneta para Bragança, escolhi a companhia que me reduziu a ansiedade.

Trecho inicial retirado de "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" de Jordan Peterson

Imagem retirada de "Find Better Problems Worth Solving with the Customer Forces Canvas"

Delicioso

Aqui no blogue costumo escrever sobre o fuçar, sobre como os práticos da indústria, sem CV na academia, fazem o que os académicos não conseguem encontrar nos seus estudos. Recordo sempre Daniel Bessa e o calçado.

Matthew Syed no livro "Caixa Negra" conta uma estória muito interessante:

"This was a major problem for the company, not just because of maintenance and lost time, but also in terms of the quality of the product. They needed to come up with a superior nozzle. Fast. And so they turned to their crack team of mathematicians. Unilever, even back then, was a rich company, so it could afford the brightest and best. These were not just ordinary mathematicians, but experts in high-pressure systems, fluid dynamics, and other aspects of chemical analysis. They had special grounding in the physics of “phase transition”: the processes governing the transformation of matter from one state (liquid) to another (gas or solid). These mathematicians were what we today might call “intelligent designers.” These are the kind of people we generally turn to when we need to solve problems, whether business, technical, or political: get the right people, with the right training, to come up with the optimal plan.
.
They delved ever deeper into the problems of phase transition, and derived sophisticated equations. They held meetings and seminars. And, after a long period of study, they came up with a new design. You have probably guessed what is coming: it didn’t work. It kept blocking. The powder granularity remained inconsistent. It was inefficient. Almost in desperation, Unilever turned to its team of biologists. These people had little understanding of fluid dynamics. They would not have known a phase transition if it had jumped up and bitten them. But they had something more valuable: a profound understanding of the relationship between failure and success. They took ten copies of the nozzle and applied small changes to each one, and then subjected them to failure by testing them. “Some nozzles were longer, some shorter, some had a bigger or smaller hole, maybe a few grooves on the inside,” Jones says. “But one of them improved a very small amount on the original, perhaps by just one or two percent.” They then took the “winning” nozzle and created ten slightly different copies, and repeated the process. They then repeated it again, and again. After 45 generations and 449 ‘failures,’ they had a nozzle that was outstanding. It worked “many times better than the original.” Progress had been delivered not through a beautifully constructed master plan (there was no plan), but by rapid interaction with the world. A single, outstanding nozzle was discovered as a consequence of testing, and discarding, 449 failures."

Lembrem-se do desfile.

"we have no real way of knowing what's viable until we actually give it a shot"

""It's not what you don't know that kills you," Mark Twain famously said, "it's what you know for sure that ain't true" and that's the real innovator's dilemma. Innovation, necessarily, is about the future, but all we can really know is about the past and some of the present. Innovation is always a balancing act of staying true to your vision and re-examining your assumptions.
...
Innovation is always about the future and the future, especially with regard to technology, is often uncertain.
...
Lean startup guru Steve Blank likes to say that "no business plan survives first contact with a customer." It's one of those quotes that's constantly repeated because it's so obviously true to anyone who has ever launched a product. We can analyze surveys till we're blue in the face, but we really don't know what will happen until we see something hit the market.
...
If you went to an investor and said you wanted to start a business but did not have any idea about the technology, the customer or the competitive environment, you probably wouldn't get very far. Nevertheless, that's exactly how every business starts. You have some assumptions, many of which will be proven wrong and you will have to adapt. [Moi ici: Por causa disto é que considero de uma imprudência alarmante isto e isto]
...
Unfortunately, an idea can never be validated backwards, only forwards, so we have no real way of knowing what's viable until we actually give it a shot. That's why the ones that succeed learn how to test new ideas, see what happens and learn until they find something that really works. Innovation is never about what you know, but what you don't."

Trechos retirados de "Innovation Isn't About What You Know, But What You Don't"

Regras

Regras para a reunião semanal que uma PME vai começar a fazer amanhã.

• Começar às 9h00 de segunda-feira;
• Demorar religiosamente não mais de 30 minutos;

Quem pensa o grupo, o todo:

• O que temos de entregar esta semana e riscos associados;
• O que temos de entregar na próxima semana e riscos associados;

Cada um dos presentes

• Problemas que cada um sente ou prevê e pedidos de ajuda.

Por favor, lembrem-se que é meia-hora.

Não venham lavar roupa suja nem venham pedir reflexões filosóficas.

Não venham criticar, para isso haverá outros momentos e tempos e se calhar outras pessoas, aproveitem para comunicar e para facilitarem a vossa vida e a do parceiro tendo em conta o resultado pretendido: o do todo.

"Here’s a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws."

Trecho retirado de "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" de Jordan Peterson.

"a Rare Opportunity to Be Strategic"

"When charged with acquiring new business, the natural and essential first questions are: “Where is the business going to come from?” and “Who should I be pursuing?” If we are putting together a prospecting and new business development sales attack, we need to know where to go and whom to target. That’s why selecting targets is the first step in the process. Quite simply, we can’t prospect if we don’t know who the prospects are.
.
Most salespeople spend the majority of their time in reactive mode responding to potential opportunities that come their way. The need for a defined list of target accounts does not register because, honestly, they are not targeting anyone. However, the proactive new business hunter requires a strategically selected list of appropriate target accounts in order to launch the attack.
...
Selecting Target Accounts Is a Rare Opportunity to Be Strategic.
It’s surprising how often senior executives or even first-line sales managers take for granted that their people are working the right accounts. Choosing our target accounts, which effectively also means choosing how we should be investing our time, is one of the few truly strategic things we do in sales. ... Choosing the accounts on which we’ll focus our proactive energy provides a rare opportunity to step back from the daily grind and ask the important, big-picture questions.
.
Who are our best customers? What are their common characteristics? What do their businesses “look, smell, and feel” like? Where are they located? Are they a particular size (e.g., in terms of revenue) or in certain vertical markets or niches where we have a higher rate of success? Where can we find potential customers with similar profiles?Does our best chance for new business lie within our current portfolio of existing customers? How should we rank those current accounts and then segment our focus across various types of customers, based on growth potential? How much of our time should be allocated to account penetration, to prospecting, to working referral sources? Are there certain competitor’s accounts that make sense to attack?
.
These are all highly significant and strategic questions, and I advocate the involvement of senior leadership in the decisions. The sales-person is entitled to input from management to ensure there’s strategic alignment between the business and the sales effort, and management should certainly have a keen interest in how the sales organization is investing its time.
...
Even the best talent will fail if too much time is wasted attacking the wrong targets."

Trechos retirados de "New sale. Simplified" de Mike Weinberg.

Um mundo polarizado

"Organizations that need to adopt different personas often get into trouble."

Talvez por isso tenha sorrido ao ler "Honey, Pick Up Some Milk From the GOP Store" e pensado logo no problema das estruturas gigantes, condenadas à suckiness por causa dos volumes e incapazes de tomarem decisões que criem inimigos.

Por isso, sorrio e discordo completamente de:

"The battle between Goliath retailers and independent brands has been underway for a while. But with companies like Amazon and Walmart only expanding their reach, Leavitt predicts indie brands will start to struggle to sell their own products direct-to-consumers."

Para reflexão

Companies can’t innovate NOT because they lack ideas or smart people.

They can't innovate because innovators have to explore ideas within the culture, processes, and incentive system of execution.

You can’t cost-cut yourself to growth. It requires exploration!

— Alex Osterwalder🇨🇭 (@AlexOsterwalder) March 2, 2018

"You can’t cost-cut yourself to growth."

Sempre que leio algo deste género recuo a 2006/2007 e a "You cannot shrink to greatness".

Uma troca justa

"We all know the feeling: what matters to us when buying something is not necessarily the same as what our partners, friends, colleagues or even total strangers emphasize when looking for the same product. Customers and consumers are not all alike. What value we get from a product is unique to us. While this is old wisdom, we still see that many businesses still take the same price across all customers.
.
If someone is willing to pay more for a product or service, because she gets more value out of than the other person, then why not find a way to charge such a higher price? It is true that in some countries, price discrimination where you charge different prices to different customers for the exact same product is illegal. But charging different prices for products that are also differentiated according to the value they bring, is always legal."

Ontem tive esta conversa numa empresa. Perguntaram-me:

- Agora que nos vai conhecendo, diga-nos sinceramente o que pensa de nós? 

Disse-lhes que os achava um diamante em bruto com um potencial muito grande se:

• aumentarem a facilidade com que lidam com a complexidade e variedade de produtos que fabricam; e
• forem convenientemente remunerados pelo valor que fazem os clientes experienciarem

- Mas às vezes competimos com empresas que fabricam produtos sem marcação CE e, por isso, podem ser mais competitivas no preço.

Disse-lhes o que costumo responder quando um cliente me diz que a sua concorrência está a fazer malandrice para ganhar um negócio. Se o vosso cliente aceita a entrada de máquinas nas suas instalações sem a marcação CE então é porque não é, ainda, o cliente adequado para vocês, ou ainda não chegou lá, ou nunca lá chegará. Ou então, não estão a fazer o trabalho certo de o elucidar sobre como a vossa oferta lhes facilitará a vida.

Depois, a conversa evoluiu para a minha clássica defesa de que cobrar mais porque se faz o cliente ganhar mais não é roubar, não é enganar, é simplesmente uma troca justa.

Trecho inicial retirado de "Using Segmentation to get Higher Prices"

Frases de ministro quase sempre envelhecem mal

Ser político obriga a cada coisa

""Se a conjuntura explicasse tudo, a aceleração não seria apenas em Portugal, seria um fenómeno europeu e isso não é a realidade", acrescentou."

Palavras proferidas pelo ministro da Economia a 30 de Maio de 2017, para suportar a ideia de que Portugal era um oásis.

Entretanto:

"É uma constante em toda a União Europeia: são muitos os Estados-membros que registaram em 2017 o maior crescimento da última década. Em Portugal, o marco remonta a 2000. No ano passado todos os países da UE registaram crescimento económico. Uns mais do que outros: a Irlanda e a Roménia lideram a tabela enquanto Grécia e Itália estão no fundo. Portugal foi o nono Estado-membro que menos cresceu, à frente da Alemanha, França ou Reino Unido."

Já agora, há anos que não percebo porque fazem esta comparação:

"Por outro lado, Portugal registou um melhor crescimento económico em 2017 do que as principais economias da União Europeia. Entre essas, a Itália foi a que menos cresceu (1,5%), seguida do Reino Unido (1,7%), França (2%) e Alemanha (2,2%). Portugal ficou também acima de países nórdicos como a Dinamarca (2,1%) ou a Suécia (2,4%)." 

As principais economias da União Europeia crescem sempre menos que as economias da Europa de Leste. Assim, vamos paulatinamente sendo ultrapassados na criação de riqueza per capita por esses países, enquanto que por cá, governos de esquerda e de direita se enganam, e enganam-nos, ao compararem o crescimento do PIB com a média da União Europeia.

Números muito bons

Números muito bons, tendo em conta Marn e Rosiello:

"As exportações dos vinhos do Alentejo aumentaram quase 12% em valor e 2,3% em quantidade em 2017, enquanto o preço médio cresceu mais de 9%, em comparação com 2016, revelou hoje a Comissão Vitivinícola Regional Alentejana (CVRA)."

Trecho retirado de "Exportação dos vinhos do Alentejo sobe 12% em valor em 2017"

"get the customer to appreciate a bigger picture"

Um conjunto de bons conselhos sobre value-based pricing em, "The 4 Basic Value Selling Skills And How To Teach Them":

"Customers who define narrow, specific needs tend to focus primarily on price because there are often a number of competitors who can meet those needs … so they will treat your offering as a commodity. Your reps have to know how to get the customer to appreciate a bigger picture:[Moi ici: Recordar "resourceness is not an intrinsic characteristic of a resource, but is a socially constructed and institutionalized phenomenon"] the bigger the perceived need, the more urgency the customers will have to buy and the more they will focus on value-drivers, not just price.
...
Customers go through predictable steps when making a buying decision. To sell value, the rep must be able to understand and support that process. What are the steps? What are decision makers typically involved? What role does each type of decision maker play in the process? At what points in the process does each decision maker get involved? And, most importantly, how can the rep make contact with each of these decision makers?
...
Value-based selling only occurs when the customer is looking at factors other than price. That means your reps have to become adept at knowing what specific features of your offerings represent strong positive differentiators. On the flipside, they also need to know differentiators where your competitors have the advantage. They must know how to emphasize the former and downplay or counteract the latter."

"we must have a clear picture of the customers we're targeting"

"If we're committed to proactively going after new business, then we must have a clear picture of the customers we're targeting. It's challenging, to say the least, to pursue something if you do not know in which direction to head. Therefore, selecting targets is the first piece of the puzzle and first aspect of our new business framework.
…
When attacking targets, it really helps when we're able to create and deploy the necessary weapons. There's an entire arsenal of weapons available to the salesperson. Not only must we be armed, but it's critical that we become proficient firing those weapons at selected targets.
…
Finally, we come to planning and executing the attack. I like to say that it's all academic unless you actually take the field. Selecting the right targets and possessing the appropriate weapons are meaningless unless we get into action. Remember: SALES IS A VERB. Planning our sales attack forces us to have discipline and to take a hard look at our calendars. We need to declare what weapons we'll be shooting at which targets, and when. And then we must do it, monitoring and measuring our activity along the way.
…

• Poor target selection or lack of focus on selected targets

• Lame sales weapons or lack of proficiency deploying weapons


• Inadequate planning or lack of execution of the plan 

Truth be told, most sales teams struggle with more than one of these three issues.
…
However, there are a few critical assumptions that accompany my declaration. Yes, assuming can be dangerous, but in order to help fix a sales problem, we need be assured it's a sales problem. I guarantee that the sales problem lies in one or more of those New Sales Driver categories, assuming: 

• The business has a clear strategy, a defined place in the market, and there is demand for its offering. 

• The sales compensation plan is not working against the desired sales effort. 

• The sales talent would at least qualify as "average." 

...
Those are not outlandish assumptions. Said simply: The business knows what it is and where it is going; the pricing model makes sense based on the value delivered; the compensation plan is not incenting salespeople not to sell; and the person or people in question would rate as a B- or better."

Trechos retirados de "New sale. Simplified" de Mike Weinberg.