Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 244
May 22, 2017
How Anyone Can Use Business Analytics to Turn Data into Profitable Insight
When something about your business isn’t working, you set out to change it, right? Naturally. But how do you decide what changes to make to fix the problem? In many cases, decision-makers rely on gut instinct to guide their organizations in a new direction. Sometimes this works out; however, it’s unnecessarily risky. Arm a decision-maker with some data analysis and he or she can make a more informed decision.
So, why don’t more businesses utilize the wealth of data that’s available to them? According to Piyanka Jain and Puneet Sharma in their book, Behind Every Good Decision: How Anyone Can Use Business Analytics to Turn Data into Profitable Insight, many businesses don’t bother analyzing data because they don’t have an “analyst” on staff. While a highly skilled analyst can be very valuable asset, anyone can be trained to do basic analytics, and in many cases, this basic level of analysis provides sufficient insight to steer a business in the right direction.
If you’re interested in learning a variety of analytical techniques and how to use analysis to guide decision-making, I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book.
Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:
“There is a costly misconception in business today – that the only data that matters is BIG data, and that complex tools and data scientists are required to extract any practical information. Nothing could be further from the truth. In Behind Every Good Decision, authors and analytics experts Piyanka Jain and Puneet Sharma demonstrate how professionals at any level can take the information at their disposal and leverage it to make better decisions. The authors streamlined framework demystifies the process of business analytics and helps anyone move from data to decisions in just five steps… using only Excel as a tool. Readers will learn how to: clarify the business question; lay out a hypothesis – driven plan; pull relevant data; convert it to insights; make decisions that make an impact. Packed with examples and exercises, this refreshingly accessible book explains the four fundamental analytic techniques that can help solve a surprising 80 percent of all business problems. Business analytics isn’t rocket science – it’s a simple problem-solving tool that can help companies increase revenue, decrease costs, improve products, and delight customers. And who doesn’t want to do that?”
The post How Anyone Can Use Business Analytics to Turn Data into Profitable Insight appeared first on Selling Energy.
May 21, 2017
Weekly Recap, May 21, 2017
Tuesday: Explore reasons why people invest in energy efficiency, beyond saving energy and/or money.
Wednesday: Explore more reasons that one might want to pursue energy efficiency.
Thursday: Read how to quantify and monetize the benefits of a project more effectively.
Friday: Try not to confuse the customer, and always keep in mind that they may not be experts in your industry.
Saturday: If you want to avoid giving the impression you lack confidence or authority, check out this article from the Inc. blog on words to avoid.
The post Weekly Recap, May 21, 2017 appeared first on Selling Energy.
May 20, 2017
10 Words to Avoid in Your Next Email
When you are communicating with someone in writing, the words you choose to use have an impact on the way your reader perceives you. If you look at emails that C-level executives send and compare them with those sent by lower-level employees, you will notice that the executives’ emails are more concise and direct. They choose words that are straightforward and definitive. Why? As leaders, executives must project confidence and authority. They also can’t afford to give wishy-washy directions to their employees, so they choose words that are not likely to be misinterpreted.
Whether you’re a C-level executive or not, you can use words to project your confidence. And as we all know, confidence is a key trait of efficiency sales professionals. The next time you are writing an email, read it over before clicking “Send” and see if any of your words evoke a lack of confidence or show hesitation in what you are trying to communicate to the reader.
For a list of some of the most common words to avoid, check out this article published on the Inc. blog.
The post 10 Words to Avoid in Your Next Email appeared first on Selling Energy.
May 19, 2017
Don’t Confuse the Customer
We have so much jargon and so many acronyms in the energy industry that it is easy to confuse non-energy professionals. As many of you know, I’m a big proponent of clarity and simplicity – the fifteen-second elevator pitch, the one-page proposal, the one-page financial summary, and so forth.
When you’re talking to a prospect or customer, always keep in mind that they are not (usually) experts in your industry. One of the quickest ways to lose a sale is to make your prospect feel overwhelmed, and one of the sure-fire ways to make your prospect feel overwhelmed is to talk to them in a “different language.”
A graduate of the Efficiency Sales Professional program told me a story about a meeting he had with a prospective buyer. After meeting with several lower level managers, he secured a meeting with the chief financial officer who had the power to make the final decision. Ten or fifteen minutes into the meeting with the CFO, the CFO stopped him and said, “Excuse me, I just have a question. What is HVAC?”
As you can clearly see from this story, even something as basic as “HVAC” can be foreign to a non-energy professional. You’re better off assuming that your prospect doesn’t know the first thing about what you’re selling. If you can present the facts in a way that a child would understand (without belittling your prospects, of course), you’ll have a much better chance of getting through to them and helping them connect the dots.
The post Don’t Confuse the Customer appeared first on Selling Energy.
May 18, 2017
Quantify and Monetize Effectively
If you read my last two blog posts (see “Energy Efficiency Drivers, Part One” and “Energy Efficiency Drivers, Part Two”) you know that people are motivated by a wide range of efficiency drivers. The ones I discussed are only the tip of the iceberg, and as an efficiency sales professional, it’s your job to determine all the possible drivers for your product or service in your target market. One of the best ways to do this is to talk to your previous customers and find out what benefits they experienced in the wake of the project. You may discover that your customers are enjoying benefits they didn’t originally expect to enjoy, and you can leverage this information when convincing a new prospect to buy. If you’re going to take this route, you need to know which benefits can be quantified, and which benefits can be monetized.
A few years ago, I was privileged to be a speaker at a utility awards ceremony. The utility was recognizing folks who had received the largest rebates in the preceding year. In this case, the top award went to the president of a large gourmet vegetable farm. In his acceptance speech, the president graciously thanked the utility for giving his company $2.7 million in the preceding year to make his brand-new greenhouse more efficient from a natural gas perspective. He was quick to note that the biggest savings came not from the reduced gas bill, but rather from the increase in crop yield. It turns out that the demand control ventilation system they installed in the greenhouse to accomplish the gas savings actually allowed him to control the CO2 levels in the greenhouse more accurately. This resulted in a 15% higher yield of the vegetables that were being grown in that greenhouse.
As you might imagine, the 15% increase in crop production was incredibly valuable for his business (as it would be for any other similar business). If one of your existing customers tells you about a great side benefit like this one, you would be crazy not to make use of it. Quantify and monetize the benefit so that you can leverage it to not only capture the attention of similar prospects, but also improve the financials of similar projects before requesting capital.
The post Quantify and Monetize Effectively appeared first on Selling Energy.
May 17, 2017
Energy Efficiency Drivers, Part Two
Today, we’ll continue with more drivers for energy efficiency improvements beyond the most obvious “saving energy” or “saving money.”
-Upgrading the user interface: If you can determine that your prospect is interested in having a better understanding of what’s happening in the building, this would be a great “felt need” to leverage.
-Earning the ENERGY STAR® label or LEED® certification: There are a lot of people out there who want to save energy. Some just want the label (which is fine). If you’re an income-property business, the ENERGY STAR® label might just be your ticket to higher occupancy rate, base rent per square foot, and sales price per square foot. In fact, there are about a half-dozen studies done in the last several years that have data to prove it.
-Avoiding an embarrassing energy performance score: If you’re a building owner, there’s a tremendous opportunity for praise or embarrassment based on your energy performance score. Let’s say you’re going to sell, lease, finance, or refinance a building and you must disclose to the counterparty in that real estate transaction what the energy performance of the building is. Imagine you’re getting ready to close escrow. Right before the transaction closes, you must slide a piece of paper across the table that says your building scores 16 on a scale of one to 100. Ouch. You’ll likely be embarrassed to do so – and what if the buyer makes a “set-aside” of dollars for efficiency and/or upgrades a new prerequisite for closing the transaction? Double ouch! And from the broker’s standpoint, if you’re a leasing, mortgage, or sales broker, the last thing you need is a controversial piece of paper with a provocatively low score on it to stand between you and your commission.
-Avoiding budget cuts: Municipalities are always trying to keep firefighters, police officers, teachers, and other government workers employed. Energy efficiency is a great way to do so in a responsible fashion.
-Saving a project manager’s job: One of our students told me a story about a project that he sold to a municipality. He asked them why they decided to do the project. It turned out that it wasn’t to save energy. It wasn’t to demonstrate good governance. It wasn’t to save money. It wasn’t any of those reasons. It was simply because they had a project manager that didn’t have any projects to work on, and had they not embraced an environmental agenda and had this guy plan and oversee a lighting retrofit, he would have had nothing to do and they would have had to lay him off.
The post Energy Efficiency Drivers, Part Two appeared first on Selling Energy.
May 16, 2017
Energy Efficiency Drivers, Part One
Many people invest in efficiency measures to save energy and/or money. While these are both great reasons in and of themselves, believe it or not there are plenty of people out there who are not motivated by either one of these drivers.
Fortunately, there are plenty of other reasons that one might want to pursue energy efficiency. Here are some of the more common ones. Keep them in your back pocket so that you’ll have something interesting to say the next time you sense that energy savings or money savings aren’t going to carry the day:
-Reducing carbon emissions: If you’re talking to a director of sustainability, for example, you may find that he or she is more interested in reducing metric tons of CO2 equivalent than in capturing utility bill savings.
-Addressing tenant comfort complaints: I’ve worked in commercial real estate and energy efficiency for over thirty years. As far back as I can remember, tenant satisfaction surveys have listed “too hot/too cold” at or near the top of the list of tenant complaints. Many of the “fixes” that are normally associated with saving energy also have the concomitant benefit of improving thermal comfort for occupants.
-Improving safety: Many of the direct digital controls and dashboards that are proposed to boost energy efficiency also improve the safety of the building by enabling new levels of visibility into the quality of the airstream – the concentration of CO2, carbon monoxide, and in some cases volatile organic compounds. On a similar note, hospitals that adopt highly accurate valve solutions enjoy not only energy savings, but also a refined ability to control the spread of airborne pathogens.
-Ensuring regulatory compliance (and eliminating the potential for embarrassment): Lots of jurisdictions around the country are now mandating equipment efficiency standards. Some are even requiring buildings to benchmark their water performance and disclose it to the government on a regular basis.
-Emulating best practice facilities: Some people just want to have a great facility that they can admire – and for which they can be admired. Levels of efficiency that are outside the norm are often newsworthy, which provides the fodder for the host facility’s public relations machine to spring into action.
-Avoiding obsolescence: It’s eye-opening to think that much of the energy efficiency software that is out there was originally installed in buildings using a floppy disk! In many cases, the owner’s manual has been long lost, and the manufacturer no longer supports the software. In all too many cases, the building engineers attempting to run these facilities are on their own. As a result, many of these buildings are essentially running out of control.
Stay tuned for more on this topic in tomorrow’s blog…
The post Energy Efficiency Drivers, Part One appeared first on Selling Energy.
May 15, 2017
How to Transform Your Limitation into Advantages
Whether we’re looking into our professional spheres or our personal lives, we are constantly faced with constraints that may affect our ability to act efficiently. Often, many of our responses to these constraints may involve pulling back from the issue or finding ways around it. What if we took a different approach to solving our issues by reframing them as opportunities for transformation?
In a richly anecdotal and innovative discussion, marketing consultant Adam Morgan and co-author Mark Barden encourage readers to recognize their habitual thoughts and emotional patterns to change how they problem-solve. A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitation Into Advantages, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business examines various ideas including: knowing your “dominant path” and thinking outside it; realizing that efficiency, not resources, drives results; and, how to avoid placing unreasonable demands on yourself, your suppliers, and your customers. If you are interested in learning how to deal with constraints more effectively, especially self-imposed limits, we highly recommend reading this book.
Here is a summary from Amazon:
“A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, And Why It’s Everyone’s Business is a book about every day, practical inventiveness, designed for the constrained times in which we live. It describes how to take the kinds of issues that all of us face today – lack of time, money, resources, attention, know-how – and see in them the opportunity for transformation of oneself and one’s organization’s fortunes. The ideas in the book are based on the authors’ extensive work as business consultants, and are brought to life in 35 personal interviews from such varied sources as Nike, IKEA, Unilever, the U.S. Navy, Formula One racecar engineers, public school teachers in California, and barley farmers in South Africa. Underpinned by scientific research into the psychology of breakthrough, the book is a practical handbook full of tools and tips for how to make more from less. Beautifully designed and accessible, A Beautiful Constraint will appeal beyond its core business audience to anyone who needs to find the opportunity in constraint.”
The post How to Transform Your Limitation into Advantages appeared first on Selling Energy.
May 14, 2017
Weekly Recap, May 14, 2017
Monday: Read, You Said What?!: The Biggest Communication Mistakes Professionals Make, by Kim Zoller and Kerry Preston, on how to correct the 16 most common communication mistakes.
Tuesday: Ask yourself these 7 questions on using Simple Payback Period as a measure of a project’s merits.
Wednesday: Explore how to use emphasis to your advantage when you’re giving a presentation.
Thursday: Read how to build a successful selling relationship.
Friday: Discover how you can make every month a great sales month provided you keep a positive attitude.
Saturday: Check out this article published in HubSpot Sales Blog on “6 Phrases to Demonstrate Active Listening — at Work, or Elsewhere.”
Selling Energy Blog
The post Weekly Recap, May 14, 2017 appeared first on Selling Energy.
May 13, 2017
Demonstrate Active Listening
If you’re meeting with a prospect and you want to put your best foot forward, you must not only ask the right questions, but also listen carefully to what you’re hearing in response. A smart sales professional looks at the person who is speaking, doesn’t interrupt, and acknowledges what the speaker said and incorporates it into your response.
A recent article in the HubSpot Sales Blog gives a few key phrases that demonstrates you are listening actively. If you’re looking to learn how to show that you’re actually listening and paying attention to the person who is speaking, read the full article here.
The post Demonstrate Active Listening appeared first on Selling Energy.
Selling Energy
- Mark Jewell's profile
- 7 followers
