How much time and money did you spend last year to make sure your sales and marketing teams could articulate your value proposition?  Now, how much did you spend making sure the rest of the company could do the same? If you’re like most organizations, with the exception of what might be in an employee manual or on a corporate brochure, the remaining employees (often over 80% of the staff) have been ignored. And so what is the result?

If you go into most mid-sized businesses and ask anyone outside of marketing and sales what the company does, you will get a different response from each person. There is no cohesiveness or understanding across the organization. But these are the people who are interfacing with your current and future customers on a daily basis. Outside the company they are talking to prospects, future employees, potential investors, you name it! Wouldn’t it make sense that they have a clear understanding of your business? That is where the Playbook comes in.

The Playbook is for everyone in the company. It isn’t an employee manual. It isn’t a business plan. It is a key to success. The average Playbook is about 20 pages long, and it clearly articulates your brand, your corporate values, and the business you are in. It defines your target audience, the value you bring to your customer and your unique selling proposition. It may contain other elements, like customer testimonials, lists of competitors, and quick examples of customer successes. It also explains the company’s missions and goals and your vision for the future.

Here is a sample outline of a Playbook. It can be modified or changed completely to suit your needs.

• What is your company mission or goal statement?
• What do you sell and how do you make money?
• What are the company values?
• What is the brand and why is the brand important.
• A three to five sentence description of what your company does, written from the perspective of the problems you solve for the customer.
• Who are your top customers?
• What are some examples of products/services you’ve provided to them?
• What was the impact on the customer?
• What the future plans are for the company, what is your vision?
• What makes a good prospect?
• Why did you start the company?
• How does the company define success?
• Why are the employees important to your success?
• Who is the management team?

You can start by sending a survey out to all your employees. Let them answer anonymously but ask them to submit the one burning question about the company they’d want you to answer. Get everyone on the same page and watch what happens.

Last week I attended the “Twitter & Tonic” panel discussion moderated by Jen Abernethy of the Sales Lounge and hosted by Success In the City.  There were several excellent panelists, including Shashi Bellamkonda, Diana Kursfeld, Justin Hart, and Linda Messina.  Anyone not twittering when they walked into the event definitely walked out determined to start tweeting right away. What is amazing is the number of companies springing up overnight with products to support your twitter habit. People are getting business from Twitter, making new friends, and keeping on top of current events.

The impact that Twitter is making on people the world cannot be understated. In fact, the night I attended this workshop, Twitter shut down at 5pm for one hour of maintenance p. The shutdown, originally planned for midnight hours had been rescheduled at the specific request of the US State Department because Twitter was the only source for news coming out of Iran during the election protests.

Twitter has yet to figure out a revenue model. There are hundreds of companies springing up all around the world offering tools to help manage your twitter streams, tweet more effectively, tweet on your mobile device, the list goes on. So you have people either putting in their own money or taking the investment from someone else to build a product that supports a product that makes no money.

There is an ironic similarity between Twitter and the US auto industry. Both have millions of customers and can’t figure out how to generate a profit. Hundreds (if not thousands) of satellite companies exist to support both organizations. Will there come a time when Twitter is so integral to the way we communicate in the US that they’ll qualify for bail out funds just to stay online?

It was not that long ago that we saw millions and millions of dollars go up in smoke when the first round of dot com companies blew up. Back then nobody seemed concerned about building a company founded on sound business principles and a strong revenue/profit model. Instead, we wasted money on huge marketing budgets, ridiculous advertising campaigns and luxurious office accomodations. We kept telling ourselves we’d “make it up in volume.” Well, clearly that didn’t work. [Read more...]