This article is about understanding the stakeholders in your business and how we can influence them
What is a stakeholder?
According to BusinessDictionary.com, stakeholders in general are “…a person, group or organization that has interest or concern in an organization”. In general, the word stakeholder refers to the business, its investors, employees, customers and suppliers. In broader terms, it also includes the community, government and trade associates.
In a video by David Butter on Stakeholder Management, he defines a stakeholder as someone who can make or break a company. In other words, they’re either with the company and make things happen or they can kill the company.
Oftentimes, companies are passionate about getting close to their customers and making sure that they are given what they want. But the definition mentioned above implies that because stakeholders can either make or break a company, it is therefore important to also have a high level of passion with working with them.
Who are the key stakeholders?
As mentioned above, stakeholders are typically any person that has an interest or concern in an organization and consists of a few categories. But who are the key stakeholders? Key stakeholders, as the word ‘key’ implies refer to the main people that can help a company’s planning effort succeed or fail by providing key information and resources.
Different companies have different stakeholders. Some consider their Senior Leadership Team – CEO, COO, CFO as key stakeholders while others have customers, owners, investors, creditors, directors, etc. as part of their key stakeholder list.
With that said, it is critical to identify who the key stakeholders are in your company to better address them and work with them to get things done.
How can we influence them?
And because stakeholders have a say on the company, it is also very important that a company engages them toalign interests and avoid conflict during the planning process.
One of the best ways to do this is bydeveloping a One-Page Plan (1PP) for each stakeholder.The 1PP will help simplify the process when deciding on which actions and steps are appropriate to meet the needs of each stakeholder and ensure a smooth relationship going forward.
Another way of influencing your key stakeholders is to compare yourself to the competition against the criteria that key stakeholder groups require. How does your company fare against the competition when it comes to engaging key stakeholders? Are you willing to listen, meet and exceed their expectations?
Will you consider changing some things in your company as a result of engaging with your stakeholders? Managing and engaging your stakeholders is relevant to any organization. It plays an important part in the success of any company.
Who are has the most influence over your business? Have you had meaningful discussions with them lately?
It is not a new idea that smartphones and mobile applications are the latest buzz in the cellphone world. These kinds of devices and applications are already a part of almost everyone’s personal lives and businesses. In fact, because of its popularity, the word “app” has been chosen by the American Dialect Society as the “Word of the Year” for 2010.
To get a clearer view onthis reality, an infographic from Topapps.net lays out in detail how mobile apps have changed the world.
According to Topapps.net, among the popular App stores, Apple App Store grabs the top most position with total available apps of around 850,000 and 50 billion total downloads.
Following the list are Amazon appstore with 75,000 apps, BlackBerry App World with 120,000 total apps, Google Play with 800,000+ apps, Nokia Store with 365 million apps, Microsoft Windows Phone Store with 145,000 apps and Samsung Apps with 13,000 apps.
On the basis of the market share and approach to the monetization, ABI Research (2013) has ranked Apple as the number 1 apps store followed by Google at number 2 and Microsoft at number 3. Wide variety of mobile apps are available among which the most popular ones are for games that accounts for total of 33%. Widgets hold 8%, Entertainment 7% and Social 5%.
There are various messaging apps used all over the world and among all, the top most position is taken by Facebook Messenger with 700 million users. WeChat has around 300 million users, What’sApp 200 million, Viber 175 million, Line 100 million and BBM 60 Million.
The direct revenue from the sales of apps in the year 2011 was around $7.3 Billion which is expected to reach the figure of $36.7 Billion by the year 2015.
By looking at this infographic, we can easily see that mobile apps have largely impacted the way we do things. For me, this poses a couple of questions:
1. Is there scope to develop a custom app for your business? These can be internally or externally focused. The cost of doing this is no longer prohibitive and the benefits in terms of customer service, access to information and/or process efficiency can be high.
2. Where next? As custom software (apps) become more and more affordable and accessible – what is the next phase in this trend? More consolidation of apps across businesses or more specialization and loyalty?
1. When did you last complete a competitor analysis?
Almost all business leaders are aware of their direct competitors but when was the last time you actually completed a formal analysis by way of a ‘competitor analysis’? This should be at least an annual process to help pin-point key opportunities for improvement. To complete a competitor analysis:
List 4-5 insights / key success factors down the left hand side of your page then weight them out of 100
List your business now in a column along the top followed by a further 3-4 competitors
Now score your business 50% of the weighting as a benchmark and then score each competitor against the various insights / key success factors
The key question to ask at the end of this quick exercise is, “What is the biggest area you could focus on to lift your score and thus improve your ability to beat your competitors?” For more information on this tool please watch this short video: Competitor Analysis
2. Focus on your early adopters
When planning a new innovation, project or roll-out of a new strategy businesses will often announce the change to all team members or customers at the same time. This can typically lead to the ‘laggards’ or those not as open to change pushing back regardless of the positive impact the suggested change will achieve. This in turn reduces the potential success of the new initiative. To boost the potential of success in rolling out a new project or strategy a more effective approach would be to introduce it to the early adopters in the team or within the customer base to get their buy-in first and iron out any issues (as they are happy to provide constructive feedback and embrace new ideas). After this first phase is completed with early adopters and issues ironed out the entire team can then be approached and the potential for success will be much higher than before.
3. Under-promise, Over-deliver
Whether you are setting time-frames for growing into a new market segment, setting budgets for next year or just responding to a sales call its critical to ‘under-promise’ and ‘over-deliver’ in the time frames, figures or parameters being suggested. As this is far from the norm in the current high-paced business environment having this as a fundamental ‘theme’ will greatly assist with higher customer satisfaction and keeping stakeholders satisfied.
Businesses are under increasing stress as markets are increasingly volatile, clients are more demanding, talent is scarcer and change occurs in faster and shorter cycles. To survive and thrive business leaders have to make faster decisions, on less information, and which have greater risk. This has led to a change in how leaders need to think, decide and execute.
A good model, that addresses the four areas of concern that business leaders need to deal with, is the VUCA model (developed in the US Army War College). This consists of:
Volatility – the rate, amount, and magnitude of change drastic, rapid shifts can bring about instability for organizations and leaders, but even the minor or innocuous shifts that occur daily, such as new and “immediate” priorities that disrupt plans, or the increasing need to “multi-task,” are changes that increase volatility.
Uncertainty – the amount of unpredictability inherent in issues and events leaders can’t predict because they lack clarity about the challenges and their current and future outcomes. Uncertainty can result in an over-reliance on past experiences and yesterday’s solutions or to analysis paralysis as we sift through more and more data.
Complexity – the amount of dependency and interactive effect of multiple factors and drivers complex interactivity requires leaders to think in more creative, innovative and non-linear way; to be able to deal with shades of gray (as opposed to black and white) solutions.
Ambiguity – the degree to which information, situations, and events can be interpreted in multiple ways Ambiguity increases doubt, slows decision-making, and results in missed opportunities (and threats). It requires that leaders think through and diagnose things from multiple perspectives.
The Challenge for Leaders
For leaders the challenge is not just a leadership challenge (what good leadership looks like), but it is a development challenge (the process of how to grow “bigger” minds) to deal with the world of VUCA. Leaders, too often, have become experts on the “what” of leadership, but novices in the “how” of their own development.
So What Can You Do as a Leader?
Change the Leadership Mindset – successful tactical leaders can easily get trapped by their predictive mindset when they encounter a VUCA situation. Your coach can provide a robust sounding board, challenge your assumptions and beliefs, and help develop new perspectives, options and ideas.
Change the Leadership Approach – many leadership issues are not problems to be solved but rather dilemmas that must be continuously managed. Your coach can help you to understand this, and to manage the issues and create opportunities from this is key.
VUCA is a neutral force in the world – leaders often look at Volatility, Uncertainty, Change and Ambiguity as a negative force that they need to react to. Your coach can help you to see the potential and to transform it proactively and find the opportunity within.
Leaders Don’t Execute, leaders execute – Leaders too often get involved in driving the efforts themselves. The key is to think more strategically and to unlock the potential of your people so you can develop leaders at lower levels who can do the work where it needs to be done.
You can use Social Media as an important part of marketing and sales efforts in your business to produce new leads and higher conversions. Or you can spend a lot of time on it for no result.
How do you make sure you do the former? The first thing to consider is how can you integrate Social Media into your overall sales and marketing plan. It should tie in well with your other sales and marketing activities.
Consider these 3 main uses of Social Media to help grow your business and plan to implement these:
You can bring in new leads via your posts and tweets reaching your prospects via both viral and paid “reach” on Social Media.
Increase conversions of prospects to customers by marketing to them in ways that build trust and credibility, increase their knowledge of how your product can help them, and removing objections to purchasing.
Ensure repeat business by staying in touch with all your customers and making them aware of other products and services that can help solve their problems or fulfill their desires.
Here is how to do each step:
Bring in new leads
When using Social Media platforms your message can be shared, liked or favourited and often this means your fans’ friends can also see your content. This helps to spread your brand and content to a new market that can be very highly targeted as friends often have the same interests and problems.
Huge opportunities lie in Social Media to reach larger numbers of your target market in a highly cost effective way by using the paid advertising available on Social Media. On Facebook, for example, it is possible to reach thousands of people with your marketing message for under 10 dollars!
Your call to action can be to ask for the sale immediately with that message or put them into your marketing funnel for future contact via email and/or Social Media.
Increase conversions of prospects to customers
By regularly sharing updates with your prospects via Social Media, you continue to build trust and credibility as well as share valuable info others can use and learn from. This can also help to move potential clients down the sales funnel and make the sale.
Consider using these methods and posting up:
Free advice that adds value for your customer – this builds your credibility and their appreciation of you.
Answers to the 10 most Frequently Asked Questions that people ask you. This can help to remove any objections or queries people have about your products or services.
Personal, local or industry news. This again builds familiarity between your prospect and yourself. People enjoy buying off someone they know, like and trust.
Ask your clients to leave recommendations or positive feedback on their Social Media platform of choice. This is fantastic social proof for new visitors to your page which builds trust and credibility and also looks impressive!
Ensure Repeat Business
It can be time consuming keeping in touch with your past customers, but Social Media allows you to automate this somewhat by keeping in touch with all your past clients at once on Social Media. Post up helpful information that leads on from the product or service they have purchased from you. Share success stories of customers that have purchased additional products and services off you and encourage these customers to get in touch and discuss their current problems and needs to see if you can help.
Systematise, Automate and Outsource
The final step is to ensure you are achieving this with the least input of your time and effort via automation and outsourcing. In the same way you use a CRM to simplify your relationship management or an accountant keep track of your financials – the same options are available to you with your Social Media.
From your strategy you should create a “content plan” that details each week what types of content need to be posted. For example Monday could be a short piece of advice, Tuesday could be a success story, Wednesday some industry news, and so on.
Facebook has its own in-built scheduling tool and tools like Hootsuite allow you to post to all your Social Media channels at once.
You can also hire a Social Media marketing agency to do any part of the steps explained above including strategy creation, account creation, advertising management, marketing and content creation.
In today’s business world, most businesses are run by very competent people who are not necessarily the world’s best leaders. Most leaders are not Ghandi or Nelson Mandela but in my years of experience as a business consultant, I have observed that successful businesses seem to have a leadership team that as a group exhibits all the characteristics of a great leader. Very rarely do we find these characteristics in one person.
I recently read an article on leadership that I think could help further explain the leadership challenge. In his recent HBR article titled Management is Still Not Leadership, Dr. John Kotter, Konusuke Matshushita Professor at Harvard, explains that leadership and management are two different things, and that the obvious confusion around these terms usually cause misunderstandings and hinder businesses to achieve success.
With this emphasis, Dr. Kotter defines “management” as a set of well-known processes which helps an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Examples of such processes are planning, budgeting, staffing, problem solving, etc. On the other hand, leadership is a completely different thing. Leadership is about vision. It is about taking an organization into the future and finding the right opportunities to exploit for success. In simpler terms, leadership is about behavior while management is about processes.
Dr. Kotter highlights the mistakes we usually make in interchanging one term for the other and how these impact a business:
Mistake #1: People use the terms “management” and “leadership” interchangeably. This shows that they don’t see the crucial difference between the two and the vital functions that each role plays.
Mistake #2:: People use the term “leadership” to refer to the people at the very top of hierarchies. They then call the people in the layers below them in the organization “management.” And then all the rest are workers, specialists, and individual contributors. This is also a mistake and very misleading.
Mistake #3:: People often think of “leadership” in terms of personality characteristics, usually as something they call charisma. Since few people have great charisma, this leads logically to the conclusion that few people can provide leadership, which gets us into increasing trouble.
My experience is that it is crucial for business leaders to understand the difference between management and leadership, and to also focus on the latter, not only the former, so that wecan better prepare and position our businesses for success.This is summarized in this great quote from Kotter.
“Leadership is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it’s about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous and it’s a recipe for failure.”Dr John Kotter. 2012
This quote by Kotter (taken from his HBR article) clearly defines what leadership should be. Aiming to create a few brilliant individual leaders to “carry the rest” is where many focus their efforts, however the “real change” happens by having good leaders throughout the different levels of your business.
My experience is that good business leadership is often about having a team with clear, shared goals and a common language and toolkit for planning, problem solving and decision making. In organisations where we have focused on improving these skillsets there has been a massive payback in terms of sales, profits and employee satisfaction.
Give your team the tools and the language to make great leadership decisions and act on them – and you can’t go wrong.
The message: Don’t build a mediocre team led by a brilliant leader. BUILD A STRONG TEAM OF GOOD LEADERS.
