Work Smart; Not Hard

‘Work smart; not hard, son’.  Bemused words from my grandfather to my cousin and me.  By dint of his cleverness, a few swings of his axe, and his tractor, he had just done in a couple of minutes what we had been struggling for more than an hour to do under a brutal South Georgia sun.  For the curious among you, we were digging up a stump…it is a long story.  That was a long (SO long) time ago, but I was reminded of it recently.  And as I reminisced, it changed from a mostly-forgotten, funny episode to a lesson applicable to us all.  In our service-oriented, information-based economy, what can we possibly learn from a relatively uneducated farmer and his tractor? Plenty.

Whether you are a Product Manager at a big company or the CEO/Sales-Guy/CFO/Mailroom-Boy at your one-man outfit, it is up to you to decide where your efforts should be focused.  We have all heard of or witnessed situations where everyone in the company (yourself included) believed X, but reality turned out to be Y.  For the Product Manager in a big company, this happens very easily due to corporate culture, your own biases, or just simply doing the best you can with the directives you are given.  For the one-man outfit, this comes from being the person who is running the business. Your passion, effort, and CONSTANT decision-making is the reason the biz is even afloat.  You are the CEO and the janitor.  So you MUST be correct because nobody knows the biz or customers like you. Regardless of your role, sometimes what you think just IS NOT SO.  If it is about American Idol, who cares?  If it is about your business, you better care.

This is where grandpa comes in.  Work smart; not hard.  And go get yourself a tractor.

Work smart; not hard.
Analyze.  Run the numbers.  Do NOT just do this passively (e.g. by just looking at your overall renewal/churn rates) really dig in; remember we are analyzing here.  As an example, analyze the renewal/churn rates of your customers by their various industries.  Let’s say that you think Healthcare companies are your bread and butter.  Why do you think this?  Many times it is just because those are 3 of the 4 most recent customers with whom you have spoken.  Just to make it dramatic, let’s further say you recently decided (or for the Product Manager in the big company, you were told you had decided) that Tech was NOT an important customer industry because you haven’t heard from them in months.  But is it actually true??  Say you run the numbers and find out that while you have an awesome overall 90% renewal rate, healthcare is a wretched 30%.  That is a HUGE disparity.  Now think about all the time/effort/expense spent to sign up clients in the healthcare space.  Is it worth it given that only 30% of them make it past Term 1?  What if the same analysis shows your Tech customers are slam-dunks with a 95% renewal rate?  Given the original view, you’d have chosen to focus on Healthcare.  For the Product Manager, your product is about to suffer.  For the One Man Show, your whole company could be in serious trouble.

Go get yourself a tractor.
That is great you say, but where do I get a tractor like that?  I say go to your friendly neighborhood SaaSOptics, because it is exactly the tractor for the job.  This kind of analysis is just not easy to do elsewhere.   However, if you do not like the sound of that, with significant effort, you can go old-school and do it with Excel.  DO IT because it needs to be done, but if you go the Excel route, don’t be surprised if you get passed by a competitor on a tractor.