WHAT SPINS MY WHEELS: Business Advisory Council - keen to support SME productivity & growth - Nov 2018
1. Future of Work – Business Advisory Council
In November 2018 the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council was formed and identified four key areas for attention:
Building tomorrows skills.
How can business practically demonstrate their commitment to ensuring workers in NZ are supported to gain new skills and transition into new jobs as the nature of work changes?
How can business support operationalising micro-crediting and fees-free learning policy?
How can our tertiary institutions support this in a practical way, learning from best practice models overseas?
Accelerating our regions
Attracting high quality investment
Unleashing our SMEs
The Business Advisory Council report (May 2019) analysed the impact of new technology on New Zealand productivity and makes 12 specific recommendations with the intent of providing a tangible call to action for every business and the public sector on how NZ can work together and ensure that every New Zealander shares in the growth and opportunity automation can bring.
Skills, Retraining and Education
Challenge
Recommendation
Significant numbers of Kiwis need to be retrained and reskilled every year to close the anticipated skills gap and mitigate the risks posed by automation.
New Zealand private and public sector employers need to be at the forefront of this transformation, adopting impactful and best-practice retraining strategies.
Kiwi employers should pledge to double their investment in annual employee training, re-training and upskilling and publicly report on this investment as a credible signal of leadership in ensuring Kiwis are well prepared for the Future of Work.
Board directors should ask the following of their organisations:
What is the organisation’s strategy to at least double the rate of real productivity growth using automation technologies?
What is the organisation’s human capital strategy to train, retrain, upskill and empower its people to thrive in the Future of Work?
How will the organisation change or enhance its culture, behaviours and operating models to ensure it delivers the benefits of automation?
The Future of Work quickly becomes the Future of Education, and New Zealand needs to deliver scalable and effective ways to teach the key competencies demanded by future labour markets; cognitive skills, social and emotional skills and most significantly, technological skills.
The education system, including content and delivery methods, needs recreating to prioritise training in Future of Work skills, specifically technology skills.
A national digital and technology curriculum should be developed and made compulsory, at appropriate levels in the education system.
A “National Digital Certificate” should be created as a scalable way for businesses to retrain employees in the technology skills needed for most future roles.
A scalable mechanism is needed to encourage and require Kiwis to take personal responsibility to reskill throughout their lives. This will become just as important as saving for retirement.
5. A “KiwiSaver for Skills” should be established by creating citizen directed Lifetime Learning Accounts for individuals to tap into throughout their careers to acquire new skills or pursue higher education.
Targeted SME and Sector “Surge Support”
Challenge
Recommendations
SMEs and sectors that provide New Zealand with a comparative advantage hold the key to harnessing the benefits of automation by solving a large part of our productivity problem.
Despite SMEs making up 97% of Kiwi businesses, there is no Provincial Growth Fund equivalent for SMEs and many struggle to scale and adopt the technology needed to supercharge their businesses.
There is a strong correlation between SMEs that use three or more Apps to run their businesses and 30% more profitability.
11. High-performing, or high-potential sectors (which have self-selected) should be surged with support and targeted investment and incentives to achieve scale through automation (for example, accelerated depreciation on innovative technology assets, R&D tax credits).
12. A “SME in a Box” scheme should be created, which outlines clear, user friendly steps towards greater productivity in SMEs, including:
– Encouraging and specifically recommending App and technology use through loans, grants or investment to enable adoption and associated training.
– Partnering with book-keepers, banks and other service providers to SMEs as a vehicle to roll-out this scheme.
Setting successful sales KPIs
Tips on setting successful sales KPIs
The challenge of small business is that you are often so busy that the first indicator of success (or failure!) is the sales results for the month/quarters. The ideal situation would be to know where you are tracking before the pleasant (or unexpected!) surprise. Having a simple set of KPI’s for your sales person will positively impact this requirement.
Some stuff you need to know about sales KPIs …
When we talk about KPI’s, it’s important to note that there are lagging indicators and there are leading indicators.
Lagging indicators
Lagging indicators tell sales managers how they have been doing by looking at output and results “after the fact.”
Lagging metrics can include:
• Sales – 80/20 rule
• Gross margin
• Gross margin %
• Number of customers
• Churn rate
Lagging indicators focus on past performance. They usually get the most attention in SMEs because these are the types of numbers that get reported to the Directors and/or Shareholders. These indicators need to feed into the overall financial objectives of the business.
Leading indicators
Leading indicators focus on the likelihood of achieving goals and what might occur in the future. They’re a bit like a signposts along the road. Leading indicators are activities and actions that can be tracked or measured during the sales process as your sales person’s opportunities are being developed and the pipeline is being built.
Leading indicators include activities like:
• How many calls should a sales person make?
• How many prospects does a sales person visit?
• What types of prospect is the sales person calling?
• How many of these calls turn into opportunities?
• How many of these opportunities turn into wins?
If you really want to make a change to your sales the leading indicators are the best indicators to focus on.
Start to observe the relationship between the activities and the actual sales and you can then adjust the activities that are most important. You might then adjust your sales person’s targets accordingly.
(Please give me a call to ask for a copy of a KPI sales grid. I can tailor this to your business.)
Three fundamental principles:
Tracking KPI’s via leading indicators will give you clarity about the road ahead, allowing you to see potential “bumps” ahead of time.
1. Don’t focus on too many KPI’s at a time. Prioritise certain KPIs to focus your sales person on the desired outcome.
2. Make the KPI’s visible and review them regularly in team, 1:1 meetings and Director Meetings
3. Allow your new sales person at least a 2-3 months to settle in before you go through the process of setting up their KPIs. They need to take ownership of their indicators. Time in the business will help them to understand the detail of what makes their role “tick”.
Further food for thought…
· The best performing sales teams are ones that are able to break their sales process into individual, measurable activities. You will find that most sales happen as a result of predictable activities, and a decline in sales is usually down to neglect of these activities.
Below are some KPI’s that are interesting to follow. They will also assist your sales manager with understand how their sales person is performance across the stages of the sales cycle:
1. Average number of days in each opportunity (what opportunity is about to close therefore what can I forecast?)
2. Stage to stage conversation ratios (great for highlighting coaching priorities)
3. Opportunity to close ratio (who’s good at opening doors, who’s good at closing?)
· Boosting sales productivity in a B2B environment
1. Enable your sales person with the right content at the right time
2. Support the rep with just in time coachin
3. Identity opportunities for improvement in the pipeline
4. Establish a feedback loop between sales and marketin
· Consider setting lagging indicators that surpass those written in the sales person job description. Incentivise the sales person based on stretch revenue targets.
· Set KPIs that are SMART: Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely.
· Sales team KPIs should feed-off the over Business Objectives. Make sure that they are streamlined.
· Include your sales person in the process of setting and signing off their KPIs
· Set consistent KPI measurements and targets across the people in your sales tea