Skype job interviews: Some tips and tricks to shorten the odds…

Given the cost of travel and the need to ‘see’ as many potential NAMs as possible, companies are beginning to Skype the process, at least for initial interviews. In fact, in the US more than six out of 10 HR managers now use video to interview job applicants, according to a survey*.

As with other aspects of these unprecedented times, the key for proactive NAMs is to adapt to the Skype interview, while others are awaiting a return to the old fashioned face-to-face approach.
Besides, the use of Skype will allow you to apply for more jobs, with the added value that getting the first interview on Skype right, will make you more effective in the inevitable face-to-face second interview…..

Action

Get the background right: Unless you are blessed with an exceptionally open-minded sales director, the Skype interview will probably take place in your home office or a suitable part of your living room.
- Lock the door to prevent interruption (and explain why, to spouse, kids and pets…)
- Best to be sat behind a desk or table in order to avoid having to stage-manage your lower torso [this also allows any nervousness to be dissipated via ‘gesture-leakage’ (foot-tapping or worse, in extreme cases…)]
- Ensure that nothing that looks even vaguely confidential is visible on your shelves behind you.  ‘If she leaves our stuff on open view like that, we need someone else..’

Get the equipment right: Ideally, and laptop permitting, it has to be worth buying a £50 webcam + bluetooth clip-on mic to ensure that you look and especially, sound as good as it gets... (seriously, would you buy anything, let alone employ, someone that looks like your distorted image, taken by a laptop camera?).  Also, despite allowances being made for circumstances, interviewers have developed expectations of broadcast level standards in evaluating video-interviews. Also use an ear-phone to ensure you hear the whole question.

Get your appearance right: Dress as you would for a face-to-face interview, remembering that just because your bottom half is out-of-sight, it is possible that having to stand up in mid-interview may give away more than intended…  Use your live image to ensure that that you are staying in-frame, and then ignore it and play direct to camera 99% of the time. This will ensure that you are giving full eye contact, where even a glance at your laptop screen looks shifty… You will get used to picking up most of the interviewer’s body-language via your peripheral vision..

Get your preparation right: If you need help here, you are not using the internet properly… However, anyone who goes for a job in these unprecedented times, without first checking the company out at Companies House at £1 per company, is not ready for the move…

Beware the ‘dirty tricks’: Some interviewers switch off the camera at their end (!) to avoid you seeing their reaction to answers etc… If this happens with you, pull the plug and go for a coffee, you are already pitching at the wrong company…
- Other dirty tricks can include the ‘sell me this’ routine: In a job-interview a few years back, a pal of mine, Joe, was handed a biro by his potential sales director and told ‘sell me this’.  Joe examined the biro, snapped it in half and threw it into the waste-bin, saying: “Mr B, a man in your position shouldn’t be using rubbish like this. What you need is a pen like this, drawing his Mont Blanc into view…  (No, he didn’t get the job, but reminds me of the story every time we meet….)

NB
- The key is practice, and enough preparation to minimise distracting glances at notes
- Above all, remember that your objective in the first-interview is to land a second-interview, all the good in-depth stuff really comes into play then…

All this for a new job? Real thinkers will be way ahead of me on this, but have you ever thought that all of the above could equally apply to at least some buyer-seller meetings, in these unprecedented times…….?
* BBC

When the buyer wants too much - how to say 'no'...

S:    Sorry, we don’t give Early Payment Discounts…

B:    We have a new policy on invoice payment and we are asking all suppliers for Settlement Discounts

S:    I appreciate you have to ask, but I would like to explain why it is not going to happen with our business

B:    So, you are refusing to cooperate with one of your biggest customers?

S:    Cooperation is not the issue. I could say ‘no’ and walk. But, given our relationship, I felt you deserved an explanation

B:    Well, It better be good…

S:    As you know, based our £1m annual sales to you, a 1.5% settlement discount would be £15k

B:    So, no big deal…

S:    Hang on, there’s more... Being an ethical company, we would have to offer our other UK customers the same discount, amounting to £2.3m on our £150m sales

B:    So you are not interested in growing your UK business

S:    I didn’t say that. Because we are a global company we would have to offer the discount worldwide, amounting to £38m on our £2.5bn turnover, so you can see why it’s not going to happen.

B:    I don’t know….

S:    So if your company needs a line on our invoices reading 'payment discount', no way. However if you simply want to earn an extra £15k on our business, there may be ways…

Buyer:             Sounds interesting…
SuperNAM:    Great, now let me tell you what we want…

Adventures of SuperNAM,  Part 13

Breakfast at Costco's?

Costco got something from Tiffany for Valentine’s Day: a lawsuit claiming it had sold diamond engagement rings falsely marketed in stores using the jeweller’s name.

According to the New York Times, the suit says “Tiffany has never sold nor would it ever sell its fine jewellery through an off-price warehouse retailer like Costco.”

The real issue in these austere times might be the fact that Tiffany may eventually be happy to join other prestigious brands like Breitling, Cartier and Chanel in discovering worthwhile numbers of their target audience in the Costco traffic-flow…

Then it remains to find a face-saving way of positioning their offering, if Costco agrees to list a brand that seems a little out-of-touch with the new realities of a super-savvy, well-heeled consumer, shopping regularly in warehouse clubs…

Meanwhile, scope for some interesting top-table explanations at the resulting wedding breakfasts…? 

Amazing Amazon: Explore the supply-chain reaction to your 1-click order, in high definition...

Amazon's warehouse in Rugeley, Staffs, is the size of nine football pitches. Inside, hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle – the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time. They might each walk between seven and 15 miles today, ‘a sort of robot, in human form’.

At Christmas, the people working in this building, together with those in seven others like it across the country, were dispatching a truck filled with parcels every three minutes or so. According to the FT, before they go home at the end of their eight-hour shift, or go to the canteen for their 30-minute break, they must walk through a set of airport-style security scanners....

Products are stored anywhere there is free space, with only the computer ‘in the know’.

For a fascinating insight into Amazon ‘continuous improvement’ operations, recruitment, wage rates and its positive influence on other organisations’ operational efficiency, see this comprehensive FT article.
A ‘must-read’ for any organisation that feels they have cracked their online presence development….  

In practice, Amazon’s operational bar-raising is (or should be) even more scary for online competition than their 1-click ease-of-use…

Another nail in the hoof? Heart Attack Grill claims second victim…

John Alleman, 52, came to the restaurant daily and encouraged passing tourists to try its calorie-laden offerings. The mascot for the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas has died of a heart attack. He was the second unpaid mascot to die in the past two years.

In 2012 a man in his 40s was hospitalised after he began sweating and shaking while eating a 6,000-calorie Triple Bypass burger at the restaurant. In 2011 another unofficial spokesman, a 260kg (575lb) man named Blair River, died at age 29 from what was said to have been pneumonia.

The diner is famous for its huge hamburgers, extra-fat milkshakes and fries cooked in lard. It uses the tagline: "Taste worth dying for."

The only issue now is whether the diner will add equine-based fare to its menu in response to leading-edge appetite evolution in the marketplace…? 

Seriously, the above example illustrates the difference between knowingly eating food that has a proven record in compromising health, and being mislead as to ingredients that may or may not represent a health issue. 

The issue is profit-enhancement deception, and no amount of buck-passing should be allowed to obscure that basic fact, its consequences, and treatment...

Opportunities for all brands in a horse-meat crisis?

Anyone who believes that the current crisis is about meat-ingredients needs to re-examine the small print.... What we are witnessing is a fundamental challenge to the meaning of branding, that assumed guarantee that a branded product contains what it says on the tin, no less and occasionally a little more, in a world where every little helps...

One of the first past the post, the Savvy Consumer, lost faith in intermediaries a few years ago. She learned never to outsource her purchasing decision-making to marketers or shopkeepers, ever again.., instead demanding demonstrable value-for-money before handing over a penny... Her lack of trust and purchasing insight has now extended all the way back up the supply chain, and discovered horses in a field...

Can we blame her for never trusting any of us again...?

The meat crisis has converted us all into savvy consumers, and therein lies the opportunity...

Essentially, those brands that are prepared to deliver what it says on the tin, plus a little more, in quantities and of a quality that meets or even exceeds consumer expectations, now have a clear run...

That old-fashioned combination of Product, Price, Presentation and Place, packaged harmoniously to meet created expectation are all that is required to be better than many alternatives, in these unprecedented times..

When ingredient-cost increases can no longer be absorbed, and retailers refuse to budge, the answer is to eliminate attributes now superfluous to consumer need, rather than substituting inferior quality in attempts to short-change a savvy consumer by cheating on brand delivery.  In other words, if the product does not need a handle, its removal will not be missed, and the cost goes down...

Reverting to meeting a combination of the consumer's functional and emotional needs, better than the other guy, then becomes a basis for NAMs to build a similar 4P proposition for the retailer.

Rocket-science it ain't...

When the buyer does not benefit personally/directly from your rebate..

S:   …and of course, you also have a 2% early payment discount…

B:   ..that money goes to the Finance department.., it doesn’t benefit me..

S:   So, you’re saying it’s not important…

B:   Correct!

S:   Tell you what, I’ll take it from the Settlement  Discount bucket and add it to your margin, how about that?

B:   No, you can’t do that!

S:   You just said it wasn’t important….

B:   Well, it is important to my company, you can’t just remove it

S:   I am not taking it away from your company, I am simply transferring to a more important bucket…the total value stays the same…

B:   No, I can’t authorise that..

S:   Now let’s start again…. I represent the whole of my company in these negotiations. I had assumed you represented all of yours…

B:   Correct!

S:   But you have just implied that you are not responsible for all of the cake… I need to talk to someone who is responsible for the whole deal with us, someone who can factor in each piece…

Buyer:    I am responsible for the whole deal…

SuperNAM:   Great, so taking into account the 2% Settlement Discount, that makes your company’s total take equal to….

Adventures of SuperNAM! (12)

Twenty Retailers that will save the High Street

Unlike brand marketing, where new products enjoy high status, the NAM/KAM system tends not to acknowledge the presence of new retailers until they achieve 5%+ of our business. In fact new, low profile retailers tend to operate under the radar until a chance discovery by our competitors…(think back to early Pound Shops, for starters…)

The 20 fastest growing high-street retailers are niche-carvers, multi-channel strategists, and go-to addresses for affordable goods. All of them have found their own particular edge that enables them to look to 2013 with optimism, despite challenging market conditions.

At the same time, they are diverse. The only thing all of the business on this list have in common is growth. Store numbers range from a single one to hundreds across the country; turnover from just over £200,000 to hundreds of millions. Business growth is very much present across the spectrum, with the right strategy in place.

Real Business and Jordans have identified the 20 UK retailers that are defying the downturn, with super-smart tactics and awesome growth.

Not all will be of direct interest (yet?) but five minutes studying the list of CAGR performances might be worth a ‘mabey’…??  or perhaps a 'what if'? see below

Criteria:

• Sales greater than £5m in latest year’s accounts
• Ebitda greater than £50k in latest year’s accounts
• Latest accounts must be filed in 2011 or 2012
• Latest year and previous three years financial info to be provided (regardless of year or last filed accounts)
• UK based company
• The company needs to have grown turnover over each of the three periods, and most importantly in the final year
• Company to have been profitable in each of the three periods

What-if?
Perhaps even worth applying the above criteria to the tail-end of your customer portfolio, or the little player that naively requested a call, just-in-case?