Reyndert Coppelmans

Blog by a startup and leadership enthusiast

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SaaS Startup Sales (1): 5 Ways To Increase The Effectiveness Of Your Sales Email Campaign

You may have heard of email marketing already, and instantly associate it to all the SPAMMY messages that you received on dysfunctioning of a certain limb or a great-great-great-uncle from Nigeria that passed away and mentioned you as the sole inheritant of his fortune.

There is a fine line between email marketing and sales emails, not in the least for the systems used. Email marketing is used to share content about a topic (e.g. a company) with an audience. Think of blog updates, notifications and newsletters. Tools like Mailchimp (no affilate) help you manage your message and analyze responses. Sales emails are not so much about sharing content, but approaching an audience with a specific offer. Sales emails typically contain an offer, but nothing specific about the recipient.

Many companies still employ these ‘blast-emails’ that are sent to non targeted audiences, thousands, sometimes millions at a time. If you’re working in sales here’s 5 ways to increase the effectiveness of your email outreach in sales.

NOTE: The goal of a lead gen specialist  / Sales Development Representative is not to ‘sell’, but to discover a mutual fit between a client’s problem and your solution.

Target

A simple and effective way to increase effectiveness of your outreach campaign is to segment your mailing database. This sounds trivial, but tailoring your message to a specific segment can do miracles.

Do your homework and obtain feedback from a small segment of your mailing DB. Learn about the current problems these people are facing and how your solutions helps to solve those. Be as specific as possible and segment according to hierarchy, industry and size of the company. For example, A CFO in the manufacturing industry faces different problems than CFOs in software (Industry). Also, a controller is more concerned with reporting process efficiency than a CFO (hierarchy), who’s priority is more on driving financial results.

Short-n-Sweet

You’ll be amazed at how many sales emails are text- (or image) heavy, and the amount of time that prospects have to invest to go through a message. As more people are reviewing email on-the-go, long emails take an eternity to review on a phone, therefore your email is quickly discarded.

A short-n-sweet message ensures readability on a phone and it forces you to send an email that specifically addresses 1 or 2 problems, which your solution is perfect for. Don’t forget the call to action at the end of email.

Personalization

Opening an email and seeing your name is the minimum amount of personalization required. Many mail systems for sales outreach (I will write a separate post on this) allow you to insert different variables in a standard, yet targeted message. Some examples are Name, Title, Company-Name, Industry, Website, City or State or even customized variables (Snippets) that insert a tailor-made text for each company.

Also, when drafting a message, carefully A/B test (that’s a verb) with the subject line. A good subject line will increase the openrate of your message, sometimes up to 2.5x the industry standard. This article provides an recent study on the state of personalization efforts in Sales and Marketing.

Smart drip

It’s all in the follow-up. Many prospects may ignore your first email simply because the moment isn’t right. Obviously they’re not going to save the email for later, as they may receive thousands of those.

Setting up a cadence (drip campaign) of automated follow-up message reminds your prospect that you haven’t forgotten about them, and skyrockets reply-rates. Each prospect that you’ve approached but that hasn’t responded yet, will receive a message similar to ‘Hey, I understand you’re busy. Hope you had time to think of our proposal. Would love to hear your thoughts?’.

Depending on your audience you want to setup follow-up emails with intervals of 2-5 days, with a 3-5 cadences (that’s a maximum of 4 follow-ups).

Again the goal here is to get a response and discover the fit, not desperately make the sale.

Iterate

Always improve the way you’re reaching out to prospects and let the numbers do the talking. If you’re hypothesizing on ways to improve your message, don’t drastically change a campaign, but adjust just one variable. For example, if you hypothesize that a name in the subject line gets higher open rates, setup a V1.1 of your current campaign with just that adjustment, and run a batch of at least 200 to get statistical significance. A/B test, iterate, A/B test, iterate.

It is very tempting to do a major haulover of your copy at once, but with that you lose the ability to identify the key variable that may have made the difference. These are 5 general steps to increase the effectiveness of your sales outreach for SaaS startups. This post is part of a three post series on Startup Sales.

SaaS Startup Sales (1): 5 Ways To Increase The Effectiveness Of Your Sales Email Campaign was originally published on The Upstart

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How A Bad User Interface Is Costing Your Business Money - Enterprise Software

Enterprise software. We’ve all heard the stories about large overrun IT-budgets at governments, and the term gives many cold shivers of agony. Professionals, especially those in the service industry, may recall filling out complex forms to register their hours, tasks or budgets at hand.

The main question many of us have thought of but may have never asked is: Why do we expect the best, smoothless user experience with B2C applications and do we continue to accept the horrendous prehistoric user interface commonly seen at large enterprise software vendors?

Let’s take a look at the driving forces at play that uphold the use of complex enterprise software.

Tracking

The main driving force behind adoption of complex Enterprise software is the need of management to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across the organization. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Business Intelligence (BI) systems are configured to break down KPIs in the organizational hierarchy into a pyramid of smaller KPIs. Often these systems are tailored towards tracking a plethora of KPIs at the highest level, which translated into complexity at the bottom of the organization. KPI-tracking, sometimes too many, is the main use of enterprise software.

Vendor lock-in

A second reason companies continue to use systems with bad user interfaces is their dependence on legacy systems of large vendors. The previously popular centralized procurement policy of IT-systems, led software vendors to bid for massive contracts of customized software.

Executives got hooked on ERP & BI Systems by vendors making the sell for a ‘Flexible ERP’. This meant that ERP were heavily tailored to specific use by the client’s organization. These customizations have created a barrier to switch systems as doing so would lead the business to incur new customization costs, but then of a different vendor.

ERP systems are sold to management, not employees 

ERP systems are sold to management and are tailored to meet their specific tracking needs. When the system is procured management has considered the potential benefits of the system, but usually don’t take into account the ease-of-use for all stakeholders. As this is typically not the focus of management, ERP Vendor’s don’t keep up to par with the ease-of-use of applications in the smaller B2B and B2C market.

What are the consequences?

The consequence is that enterprises are tracking many KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) through systems with time-consuming user interfaces, resulting in employees slacking with upkeep of their reporting. In the service industry this problem is especially large with tracking hours. Employees perceive a barrier to register a relatively small time-investment (e.g. an email) because it takes time to register their time. This is one of the underlying reasons why employees have become really bad in time-registration.

In fact, employees are so bad at tracking time that the loss of revenue due to untracked hours amounts to $50,000 per employee annually, as demonstrated by Affinitylive. In the US, with 19.3 million people in professional services this amounts to $2.6 billion in the USA. A day.

The most important factor mentioned in the research results is that employees spent time on client-related emails without tracking time, because it is a seemingly small feat or that time isn’t tracked at short intervals, causing them to forget about that email at all. And this adds up.

So what’s the solution?

KISS – Keep It Stupid Simple – or KISS some KPI’s goodbye. Scrutinize which ratios you really need. Typically 5-7 KPIs is sufficient to keep track of business. For project management you essentially need to know costs or even simpler hours, and the potential business impact (revenue increase or savings). Also improve the data-consolidation from the bottom-up. Some enterprise solutions automatically consolodate data, however there are plenty of organizations still getting by on excel sheets for their management reporting.

Effortless entry – The next generation software should have a smooth user-interface, and preferably integrate with corporate mail accounts. This serves to ease form input and removes barriers for more frequent registration intervals, which was mentioned as a possible solution by Affinitylive. Effortless entry creates the right setting for busy and pressured professionals to keep up. Be sure to test the ease-of-use and required training before purchasing a new system.

A startup offering a lightweight solution for timetracking is Timely.

Involve end-users in the buying decision – Involving end-users in the buying decision will ensure that management will get their point of view on perceived ease-of-use and consequential costs associated with ‘User Interface barriers’. An up and coming trend is to let end-users initiate the solutions buying process, which brings us to the closing point.

Create an ecosystem of enterprise solutions – To avoid being stuck with one legacy system and its expensive customizations (not the mention the user-interface) the trend is to go with multiple specialized software vendors. A challenge for creating a viable ecosystem is to integrate all the applications, or creating a common denominator software. However working with multiple specialized vendors has numerous advantages.

Multiple specialized vendors will be quicker to update and adapt their software to new market developments, as their Unique-Selling-Point is usually the specialization for a niche market. Multiple vendors prevent your organization from vendor lock-in and reduce vendor-dependency for client specific implementations. It feels good to avoid those hefty consulting fees, doesn’t it?

Startups like Zapier are connecting the dots in the public SaaS space. As large organizations may be anxious to keep their data private, there must be new vendor (now or in the future) that fills this gap in the market.

At Treeveo we’ve created an Enterprise solution for Cost Reduction projects that avoids the pitfalls of complex software and the principle of dynamic complexity: simplicity at the bottom of the organization and sufficient complexity at the top to cover management reporting needs. Also, Treeveo’s visual interface adapts to the structure of a Cost Reduction project or any organizational hierarchy, depending on whether you’re breaking down a Cost Reduction goal in business-units, departments or cost centers.

  How A Bad User Interface Is Costing Your Business Money – Enterprise Software was originally published on The Upstart

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SaaS Startup Sales (3): Mail Blasts Are Out. High-Volume Targeted Messages Are In. The Third Alternative For Email Lead Generation

Email Lead Generation can be a tedious task. Finding and contacting leads based of social networks like Linkedin is time-consuming, especially if your value proposition is not clear yet.

Part 2 of this series touched on structuring the sales process after a SaaS startup has seen initial traction. Part 3 will address the Lead Generation role of the process, or in Predictable Revenue methodology, the Sales Development Rep.

Organizations typically use two ways to generate leads:

Targeted emails

The typical daily goal of a lead gen specialist is to approach 50 new prospects each day with a ‘targeted’ message. Although the value proposition in these email would be fairly standardized, the message itself would be tailored to the profile, referencing to their Linkedin profile, social media posts or press releases (if any).

This is a highly personal approach, likely to generate fairly high open- and reply rates. This however if offset by the low volume of emails that the lead gen specialist can approach, due to the labor intensity of customizing emails. Also, follow-up emails tend to be labor-intensive, and in 70% of the cases only 1 email is sent leading to suboptimal reply rates.

2. Mail blasts

As the name suggests, a mail blast is sending a product / service offer to a large database of contacts. Mail blast emails are often not customized and typically have a supplier-centric message: “We’re offering this service. Buy now!”. The content of the message is mostly directed to what ‘I’, the sales person, have to offer, instead of the value it generates for customers. The typical business newsletter is a good example.

This approach has a high volume, but yields a very low response rate. The prospect is only approached with one message, that is often quickly discarded, if it doesn’t end up in the SPAM or ‘updates’ folder, never to be looked at again.

Plus you’re signaling that you don’t care about the receiver. With one survey indicating executives receiving on average 160 emails, no wonder mall blast campaign are producing little result.

Luckily there’s a third, new way to approach prospects, combining the best of both worlds:  Tailored messages to a large database of prospects.

Targeted, high volume messages.

The trick to get high response rates lies in the customization of messages through insertion of multiple variables in a standardized message. A template may look something like this:

Subject: {startup name} & {Client name} I Time To Chat?

Hi {First Name},

My name is {Sales rep name} from {startup name}. We’re helping companies like {company name} optimize / manage their {your product pitch}.

I wanted to learn how you currently handle your (problem you’re solving) and show you how we can skyrocket results in (product category) for {company name}.

Would you be available for a call next week {weekday}?

Looking forward to hearing back from you.

Thanks,

SDR

  Sending out a message like this requires that you have a prospect database filled with variables like email address (of course!), name, title, industry, company name, location.

Not all marketing mailing systems allows for customization, however sales automation systems, like outreach.io, allows you to load a database of prospects and fills in the variables in the message for you.

That’s it!?

Not quite, there’s one important element we’re still missing to get up to 3x your industry’s average response rate. The power lies in the follow-up.

Some research by Yesware shows that some 91.24% of emails are opened the same day, and if a prospect is interested 89.74% will reply the same day. In other words, if you don’t get a reply within 24 hours your email is toast.

Amazingly 70% of sales campaigns only send one email, whereas the Yesware data shows that follow-ups pay off. Their is 21% likelihood of getting a reply to a follow-up message, and this cumulative chance of a reply increases with a every follow-up message.

Therefore, scheduling follow-up messages for prospects is key to get to those big results. Luckily those sales automation systems we talked about earlier allow you to set-up follow-up messages. In other words, if the system doesn’t detect a reply within X days, the system will automatically follow-up with another ‘customized’ message, untill you get a reply.

The trick is in the copy. Find some inspiration for templates at salesyemail. Europeans beware! American style templates tend not to resonate less with the majority of European countries. More on this in a later post.

Now that you’re up to speed on getting the best results in email outreach, the next post will explore some of the best sales automation systems out there.

I would be glad to help with any questions you may have. Just leave a comment in this article or contact me via Linkedin or Twitter.

SaaS Startup Sales (3): Mail Blasts Are Out. High-Volume Targeted Messages Are In. The Third Alternative For Email Lead Generation was originally published on The Upstart

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Romania - The Next Startup Hub?

I recently travelled to Cluj-Napoca in the heart of Transylvania (Romania) to facilitate 3DayStartup – Cluj (3DS Cluj). 3DS Cluj is an exhilarating weekend in which university students work on developing their startup ideas. Goal of the weekend is to kickstart the idea and prototype development, discover co-founders, get advice from mentors and fail fast.…

Romania – The Next Startup Hub? was originally published on The Upstart

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5 Ways To Find Anyone's Email Address

Entrepreneurs and salespeople feel the pain. You have a wonderful product that should be a perfect fit for the company, however there’s no way to reach the (apparent) decision maker. So you try. You cold call, wrestle with the gatekeepers and send messages through linkedin and twitter. Still the easiest way to get attention and a quick go / no-go is an email. Assuming that you’ve managed to pull of the key decision maker’s name of Linkedin or any other social network, here are 5 Ways To Find Anyone’s Email Address.

Please note that I strongly adhere to a polite email etiquette and that you should only use these methods to write someone with a personalized message, not for mass-marketing.

Toofr

Toofr does the guesswork for you by automatically guessing and testing different email formats based on you filling in a first name, last name and an email domain. Toofr will test a number of pre-defined formats, such as [email protected] and test its validity. Toofr is a paid service, however doesn’t charge if they guess an email with a certainty score below 40. First 100 credits are free, and it rarely happens that the certainty score is above 40.

Tip: Guessing the right email address becomes difficult for people with double first- or last names. Companies often omit one of the 2 names, so ‘Johnson – Stafford’ will become either ‘Johnson’ or ‘Stafford’ as a last name.

Email-formats.com

This website allows you to check what the most likely structure of an emailadress is for a company domain. Based on their database of email formats and scraped addresses from across the web they allow you to take an educated guess at the appropriate structure of an email address for a company domain.

Mailtester

When you had Toofr guess the most likely result, fill out the email address on mailtester. This is a service that tests whether the company has a mail server setup for the domain. Mailtester also checks whether an email exists on a certain domain, so you can be 100% sure that you’re mailing to an existing email address. The latter is not always possible as some companies have blocked email verification.

Tip: If your contact has a double last name, mailtester allows you to play around and test different formats that Toofr doesn’t.

Rapportive

Rapportive is a gmail / chrome plugin that shows Linkedin profiles in your inbox based on the email address provided. Very nifty, but rapportive can also be used to verify email addresses. Simply type in the email address in the ‘to’ field, and if the email address is tied to a linkedin profile, the profile will popup in rapportive.

This may work for people that have a business email setup with their linkedin account.

All-in-one services

There are a bunch of ‘all-in-one’ emailtester out there that attempt to automate all the processes above. The Anymail Finder App asks you to fill out a name and company domain and if there’s a match, provide you with the email address. Voilanorbert is another alternative to an all-on-one email finder. In my experience this doesn’t work as well as the ‘manual’ methods, so certainly don’t give up when these apps return zero results!

Finding personal email addresses can work in the same way, but the domain names very. Gmail does allow email verification via mailtester, yahoo and hotmail don’t. Also personal email addresses tend to vary more in structure, as they’re not tied to a ‘corporate’ format. Using a combination of the methods above will help you get an email address 95% of the time.

Update (April 1st, 2015)

Connect6

I recently came across Connect6, a service that displays information in real-time. For example, you could browse someone’s Linkedin profile and see their available contact information in the Connect6 browser plugin. I have also used Connect6 to easily build lists of prospects with a certain profession (e.g. project manager). Connect6 is a paid service that let’s you build lists of email addresses based on a searchquery. Note that a lot of the email address are personal and that if you’re building a list for business prospecting, inquiries on a personal mail address are not always appreciated!

Sellhack

Although their service was initially battered by lawsuits from Linkedin, Sellhack.com has reinvented itself and proves to be a nifty tool that combines prospect discovery, email address search and list building in one tool. Although it is a paid service I have found this tool to be very usefull and it quickly provides me with email addresses for people with Linkedin profiles. 

Full disclosure: the link provided for Sellhack is a personal signup link. If you signup we both get 50 Sellhack credits. 

Update (August 10th, 2015)

Emailhunter

My co-worker Guillermo found this little gem in the Chrome webstore. Emailhunter let’s you discover emailaddresses based on only a domainname!  Emailhunter also has a nifty chrome plugin that let’s you search email addresses associated with any linkedin account. 

The only disadvantage is that Emailhunter doesn’t allow you to discover a specific person’s emailaddress, and in my opinion, Emailhunter is great add-on to email search, but not the core solution I would rely on to fill a database. Also, the free version doesn’t allow you to export a CSV, so for high-volume lead generation campaigns you’ll probably better off paying up. 

  5 Ways To Find Anyone’s Email Address was originally published on The Upstart

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Why Storytelling Can Be Lethal For Leaders

Emotion is a beautiful thing. Once a survival mechanism for making snap decisions in dangerous confrontations between men and nature. Emotion could trigger a powerful response to previous deadly encounters with predators. Nowadays emotions are ingrained in our DNA and mainly serve to colour the world around us. It allows us to see the beauty…

Why Storytelling Can Be Lethal For Leaders was originally published on The Upstart

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The Airline Cost Contest - Legacy vs. Low-Cost

There is an prevalent and growing elephant in the industry. The Airline cost contest is becoming more and more real. The question is, “who is going to the pay the price?” – Pun intended.

Low Cost Carriers (LCCs) such as Southwest Airlines (USA), Ryanair (Europe) and AirAsia (Asia) have introduced and successfully proven that short-haul-no-frill flights are profitable. In fact, LCCs seem to be the only airlines making healthy profits, whereas the Full Service Airlines (FSCs) continue to struggle with high costs.

Why are Low Cost Carriers so successful?

The success of LCCs can be found in disciplined costs and flexible revenue structures. Over the years LCCs have successfully employed continuous costs reduction mechanisms, continuously iterating cost reduction rounds. Some of the most popular measures include fleet standardization to save on maintenance costs, using narrow-body aircraft to save fuel, having employees perform multiple roles in the boarding process, and a “point-to-point” model instead of the more common “hub-and-spoke” used by FSCs.

On the revenue side LCCs have unbundled their services. Travelers have grown accustomed to paying extra for cabin luggage, food & beverages on planes, and “premium” seats. Ryanair even went as far as introducing 3rd party advertising on their aircraft. Dynamic pricing also accounted for increasing load factors of aircrafts, reducing unit cost (CASK) and increasing the unit revenue (RASK) of aircraft.

Intense price competition on short-haul routes have sent legacy carriers into retreat. Most – if not all – legacy carriers are faced with high unit costs, and are entering slash or die territory. Although the CEOs of legacy carriers have more urgent tasks at hand – such a large scale transformations – let’s take a sneakpeek into the future of the airline industry.

What’s next – finding advantage

An ambitious entrepreneur has pitched a futuristic vision on the industry, including containerizing the loading and unloading of passengers. I want to take a look at the more short-term future.

Inflight Wi-Fi…finally.

US carriers have had in-flight WiFi since 2008, however EU carriers have chosen not to implement this. In-flight WiFi is a small improvement that has potential to give a noticeable advantage, especially since LCCs are luring business travelers by offering additional services.

Easter eggs.

The most recent booking frenzy with the United airlines error-fare has the stench of a guerilla marketing strategy. Over the past years United Airlines has experienced 6 ‘fare-gates’ stemming from struggles to integrate Continental’s booking systems after the merger.

As pricing dynamism is set to lure the price-sensitive part of the market into purchasing tickets that otherwise wouldn’t be bought, this potential guerilla strategy can generate a lot of exposure and additional revenue. This time not by openly competing with other airlines but ‘gamifying’ the booking process.

What’s Next – Cutting Costs

Economies of scale.

The low hanging fruit is to start with a long-haul-no-frills concept using economies of scale. The Airbus A380 could potentially transport 853 passengers in an economy setting. More volume to cover fixed costs and more fuel efficient aircraft results in lower unit costs. Simple. There’s still one “but”: load factors would have to be historically high in order to achieve sustainable long-haul-low-cost services.

In the EU, short-haul LCCs have attempted to crack the trans-atlantic nut with a long-haul-low costs service. As Michael O’leary commented: “The numbers don’t add up”.* Two of the most important reasons are that the increased distance doesn’t allow LCCs to capitalize on the fuel efficiency of narrow-body aircraft. Another important costs saver, airport turnarounds, can not be capitalized on with increased distance. There are simply not as many options to cut costs.

Stopovers.

Perhaps an area that has not received much attention is adding a mid-way stopover to a long-haul flight. This allows for the use of smaller aircraft which can significantly reduce fuel costs. Icelandair and WoW air are eying more low cost transatlantic flights, with Iceland strategically positioned halfway between the EU and the USA. Smaller airplanes are easier to fill, making it easier to maintain a high load factor, driving unit costs down. Plus an extra stop-over provides an extra opportunity to cut costs.

Shortest-haul

In regions with low connectivity, ultrashort-hauls can be economically viable. EasySky, a Honduran airline, operates an 8-minute flight. The flexibility and low costs of small aircraft are necessary to compete directly with boats, trains, and other means of transport. Widerøe, a regional Norwegian airliner, has profited from the longer travel time of substitutes due to rocky terrain.

Economic viability may lie in regions where few substitutes are available and a market-segment that’s willing to pay for shorter travel time. Opportunities seems to be prevalent in emerging economies with relatively low connectedness. The DHL Global Connectedness Index may also provide some interesting insights into this.

*Knowing Michael O’leary blurt-outs this could also be a strategy to deter competitors.

This post originially appeared on the Treeveo blog

Image – Kevin

The Airline Cost Contest – Legacy vs. Low-Cost was originally published on The Upstart

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What startup failure feels like

I sat down with my mentor on a rainy september morning. He asked me: “So what are you going to do?”. I wanted to go on, but couldn’t do it anymore. I was mentally exhausted and completely stressed out, and he saw this coming all the way. I replied: “I’m pulling the plug”. “Ok” he…

What startup failure feels like was originally published on Reyndert Coppelmans

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The Whimsical "Why": 4 benefits of creating organisational transparency

Knowing ‘why’ has become an increasingly important motivator for my gen X and gen Y counterparts. So why do organizations still choose to leave their employees in the dark on strategy? This article will discuss 4 benefits of creating a strategy that is transparent throughout your organization.

Especially in large organizations the ‘why’ is not always relatable to individuals goals and performance targets. In other words, it is not always clear how one fits into the complex systems that makes up a multinational company. Whether this is done intentionally to create top-heavy authority or solely because of bad communication, an unclear strategy can hinder productivity and project results, and create poor morale through the chain of command.

Let’s start by talking about motivation.

INTRINSIC AND EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION

Imagine if multinational companies chose a flat organizational structure. There would only be one management layer between executives and bottom-level employees. This is quite rare. Instead, strategy normally cascades from the top down in an organization, starting with executives discussing performance targets tailored to the new strategy with upper-management. Management receives a goal-set and cascades this goal further down to employees. By the time employees receive their targets, the goal-set is stripped of any context – or the ‘why’. This results in extrinsically motivated people. Nowadays, employee motivation depends largely on ego-centric motivation, which says “I want to collect more skills, advance myself as a person, and receive recognition from my surroundings by advancing in this career and earning more money” (extrinsic motivators).

An example of an intrinsic motivator would be knowing that the company tends to your needs or aligns with your values. Modern day companies, such as Google, have been relying on both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. Providing employees with great perks creates goodwill with employees, which motivates the employee to contribute to the overall goal. More importantly, these companies have fostered a culture of experimentation and innovation that often align with the values of the most talented employees.

WHY “WHY” MAKES SENSE

Employees know how a strategic change impacts their goals and responsibilities. (top-down)

Employees will respond more flexibly and efficiently to changes in strategy (less resistance to change). (top-down)

Employees know how they impact the big picture of their team and organization. (bottom-up)

Employees can better help their managers achieve their respective goals. (bottom-up)

One of the reasons I like working for a startup is that goals are crystal clear: we need to get x paying customers or x users on our platform to qualify for X investment funding. Also the impact that every employee has is clear. There is simply no way around it. It’s either yes or no. This is not always the case in large organizations, and as an employee it is easy to lose track of how you fit the big picture.

Just like the onset of the “why” in marketing (Simon Sinek), the ‘why’ in employee motivation is becoming increasingly important. This requires leadership transparency and a crystal clear connection between individual goals, management goals, and strategy. This ties directly to “sense of belonging” in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – knowing your place in the organization by knowing how you contribute to the big picture.

One of the main problems here is lack of communication. The free, undistorted flow of information from the top to the bottom of the organization allows people to align their values and creates “warm” or intrinsic motivation.

Becoming transparent is a great trust-building exercise and alleviates the relationships within your team and organization. To create more transparency in an organization constructing an organizational “tree” that cascades strategy down to individual employee goals is the best method to achieve this, along with rigorous tracking and measurement of progress throughout all layers of the organization.

This is not simply a matter of breaking a big goal into small pieces, but a negation with lower-level management and employees on the attainability of each goal. Each discussion should identify the resources necessary to achieve that goal, remove any roadblocks and align lower-level initiatives with strategic goals.

This article originally appeared on Treeveo.com

The Whimsical “Why”: 4 benefits of creating organisational transparency was originally published on Reyndert Coppelmans

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5 Tips for Startups from Guy Kawasaki

I got the chance to listen to Guy’s take on entrepreneurship, venture capital and pitching. Here are 5 tips for startups from Guy Kawasaki. Love thy product For an entrepreneur raised in business school the typical approach to identifying a gap in the market is to engage in extensive market analysis. “If you’ve identified a gap…

5 Tips for Startups from Guy Kawasaki was originally published on Reyndert Coppelmans

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The disruption of the consulting industry

An historically low entry barrier to start a business and virtually unlimited access to technology has enabled startups to disrupt entire industries in a matter of years. Longtime industry molochs have lost a major share of their revenue or have even disappeared by failing to keep up. This has happened mostly in industries where services…

The disruption of the consulting industry was originally published on The Upstart

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Leaders are personality chameleons

Leadership requires an incredibly diverse personality. As mentioned in an earlier blogpost on self-concepts, a leader requires the rare combination of flexibility and persistence. Why is this so hard? As you’ll know, being flexible means “to have the willingness to change or compromise” (Oxford Dictionary). Persistence on the other hand means “the fact of continuing…

Leaders are personality chameleons was originally published on Reyndert Coppelmans

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How self-concepts inhibit leadership

We start developing concepts about ourselves in our early childhood. Do you remember your child saying things like ‘I want to be a fireman’? The intriguing question here is how self-concepts define the direction of our motivation and the choices that we make in life. Let’s ask that kid a question:

‘Why do you want to be a fireman?’ ‘I want to save people.’

‘Why do you want to save people?’ ‘Because I can. I’m strong and brave.’

The latter is a simple example of how a self-concept influences the motivation and choices that we make. Self-concepts provide us with a handle, a fixed point on reference in our personality that we can fall back on. Why do we need to? Because we’re naturally looking for security and belonging.

Self-concepts are defined as “An idea of the self-constructed from the beliefs one holds about oneself and the response from others” [reference]. As we’re trying to make sense of ourselves and our place in the world we’re constantly forming beliefs. These beliefs are either approved or disapproved by our environment.

Here is where the problem lies with self-concepts: We’re letting our past choices influence our future decisions. This may especially be the case with choices we make in our careers. Once we thought “I’m a consultant. There is nothing else for me to do except to be a better consultant.” This self-concept will be the new anchor point against which we evaluate any new stimuli from our environment. To either accept or discard it. When something conflicts with our knowledge, we usually choose to discard.

Leaders

Leaders are occupied with realizing their vision. Leadership is generally not displayed by title, but by actions. Leaders are going after the unknown, an uncertain path towards a vision. Leaders require the rare combination of persistence and flexibility. Making the first successful steps in the right direction is not a guarantee that any other resulting steps will be correct. Therefore a leader needs to incorporate and objectively weigh all new information.

To ensure objectivity, successful leaders process new information by incorporating a strong self-reflection mechanism in their daily routine. They are well aware that one person cannot foresee everything, so they organize a circle of people around them that provide them with honest feedback.

Self-concepts will inhibit leaders from developing a realistic vision of themselves and their current position in their environments. And all new information will be colored by that self-concept. The only way to become a successful leader is to think of yourself as a dynamic organism in your environment exemplified by answering the question “What do you do?” with “I am.”

Once another person has discovered what your self-concepts are, you can be manipulated by that person by allowing them to reinforce that self-concept or create a new self-concept that suits the manipulator. The reason that good leaders are less prone to manipulation is that they simply don’t have self-concepts. Leaders evaluate the situation and act/react based on what action is required to move ahead without letting their actions be influenced by self-concepts or manipulation. Tailoring your behaviour to the situation requires being a personality chameleon, which will be explained in another post.

You can easily identify or discover self-concepts by 360 degree feedback from your environment. Discover how your self-concepts color the information you receive and try to change your environment. For it will only be with change that you’ll truly discover yourself. Are you a leader?

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How self-concepts inhibit leadership was originally published on Reyndert Coppelmans