My job is selling technology. Actually I'm more of a translator. I sell technology to other businesses and that's where things get weird. There is a bewildering array of tech out there and unfortunately many companies think technology sells itself and the value that the technology delivers should be obvious. Wrong. That's where I come in. I said I was a translator. My job is to translate techno babble into value that customers understand. This blog share my adventures with high tech sales. Selling high tech is fun so come join me on my sales journey!

Tuesday, 18 April 2023

Are sports watches and AI the future of medicine ?

 With doctors and nurses on strike (despite the service from the NHS being appalling) I am sure people in power are asking whether there's a more cost effective way to provide health care.

The UK is a small country with a population of supposedly 68 million people yet the NHS is the 5th largest employer in the world with 1.7 Million employees.  NHS England alone is the 12th largest organisation in the world with 1.3 Million employees.

The NHS costs tax payers half a billion pounds per day yes £500M per day.  Yet its virtually impossible to get a doctor's appointment, waiting lists are colossal.  Adding more staff to the colossal 1.7Million employees  is clearly not the answer.

Clearly there is something fundamentally wrong with the healthcare system. 

For a start it is reactive - you wait until someone is ill. There is little to no proactive prevention of illness.

Now before I start getting attacked for daring to criticise St NHS, we need to be pragmatic.

We have an ageing population - ie more people that will need more healthcare and place burden on taxpayers.

We have a falling birthrate - it has steadily fallen from around 3 in the 1960s to around 1.56 in 2020

That crudely means there are fewer people entering the workforce to pay the tax to fund the healthcare for the elderly which outnumber the youngsters.  

Proportionally it means yet more people will be needed in the NHS in the next 20-30 years to care for the elderly which means fewer people are productive in the economy and hence pay tax to fund the healthcare (and old age pensions). 

The UK has a demographic timebomb.

The UK is not alone in this.  Japan is slightly ahead of the curve.  They have cities where there are simply no young people. No schools.  Shops there sell nappies.  Not nappies for children.  Nappies for incontinent adults !  

Japanese authorities are therefore focused on how to solve this.  They are opting for robots - robots that can perform healthcare duties.

However I am wondering whether Sports Watches could be part of the solution. I recently bought one and although it is not particularly accurate (ie not medical grade so the data needs to be treated with caution) however I am impressed at conceptually what it can do.  It can measure blood oxygen levels,  blood pressure, blood glucose,  perform ECGs ad detect upto 30 heart anomolies.  It can process the data to detect sleep Apnea. There is quite a lot of leading edge science doing digital signal processing on ECG signals to detect blocked arteries and similar conditions. 

I have never worked in healthcare but I would happily place a bet that it follows the Pareto principle.  80% of problems are the same.  20% of problems consume 80% of the effort - in fact I would guess 20% of the 20%  (ie 4% of problems) consume 64% of the effort.

That would point to establishing "factories" for the 80% of problems.  Eg Cataracts factories where there's a production line fixing people's eyes.

Now I speculate that 80% of the 20% are preventable.  Strokes, heart attacks, diabetes etc I suspect fall into this 80%.  

Now if the NHS issued everyone with an accurate Sports Watch (which doesnt yet exist) and measured and collected all this data, it would firstly be able to proactively identify people who are at risk of expensive healthcare and proactively treat them.  It would also have vast amounts of data for machine learning (AI) and could improve detection and gain new medical insights.

At the moment it looks like, Apple, Samsung and Google want to be healthcare providers in the future.  Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, want to be in this game too but are blocked for political reasons.  It does have to be questioned, considering that many of the budget Sports watches are Chinese, whether the Chinese have insights into the health of the nation and so could exploit this for war or similar purposes eg where are all the unhealthy people? 

AI seems to be a natural fit for many diagnostic parts of healthcare.  For example examining cancerous cell phones.  Humans seem to be weak at medical decision tree problems - I think this is Pareto at work where experienced doctors get selection bias since they are used to seeing the same problems and tend to jump to conclusions.  AI can be trained to make sure it considers all inputs.  Even as a diagnosis tool for doctors it may force them to ask questions in order to eliminate certain diseases. 

One thing is clear - the world of healthcare has to change - it is not sustainable economically and technology looks like a key way to be more proactive and use big data to make care advances with lower costs.



Tuesday, 26 March 2019

Using Eddie Obeng to identify strategy Technology Change

Understanding how a piece of new technology relates to an organisation is extremely  useful.  If it's an evolutionary change, replacing something existing - it's pretty straight forward. However it's never been done before then it's inherently viewed as higher risk.

In Professor Eddie Obeng’s book All Change!: The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook,he provides a model for classifying projects by type. Eddie introduced an incredibly simple map to allow you to figure it out. I love the idea so much that I’ve extended Eddie’s concept and overlaid project methodologies on top of it.

Here is Eddie’s original map:





Painting By Numbers are those childhood picture kits where you match the numbered paint colours to corresponding numbered areas on the pre-printed canvas. It’s a very simple, almost foolproof, way to create a painting.

Fog is pretty self explanatory.  If you are unclear about What needs to be delivered and you’re unclear about How to deliver it, then you are lost in the Fog.

A Quest or Crusade is where there’s a strategic desire to achieve something, and clarity about What is high — while at the same time, How to actually deliver it is not clearly defined. These can be “boil the ocean” type projects if not controlled.

The Making a Movie category has low clarity for What whilst clarity about How is high. The idea being that everyone knows the basics of how to operate a video recorder, but that’s not the same as knowing how to make a movie. The same equipment can be used to create a Hollywood blockbuster, or an amateurish home video.

Now let's extend Eddie's concept with the question Why.  Why is a great strategy question?   Why do we want to do this?  Answering in the form "In order to ....." can help obtain great insights.  Young children sometimes repetitively ask "Why?" - although extremely irritating to adults it can expose deep seated assumptions and bias.  As we become adults we unfortunately stop this powerful habit.

So asking "Why?" several times can drill down into useful information.

Now let's create a new Eddie matrix.
















So this new matrix maps the Why.  It doesn't seem to make a lot of difference if you ask How or What with the x axis.

So if you are clear about Why you're doing something and you're clear about what and How then you have a clearly defined strategy. 

If you are clear about What or How to do something but don't know why, there's a pretty good chance you're following the crowd.  For example "we need to move to the cloud".  Why?  Everyone else is moving to the cloud !!

If you're clear about Why but haven't got a clue what to do about it, there's a pretty good chance it's an existential threat.  For example "plastic pollution will kill the planet" - it's a pretty clear reason why you want to do something but the human race is unclear What to do about it or How to tackle the problem.  Plastic pollution is therefore absolutely an existential threat to planet earth.

The fog box is pretty much the same as Eddie's box.

So if you need to do something different to the normal modus operandi then asking Why to get into the Clearly Defined Strategy box is a useful tool.

Sunday, 3 November 2013

Economic theory is flawed

With rising energy prices, today I decided to purchase some high efficiency LED light bulbs to replace some fluorescent bulbs and some small halogen bulbs (there are no fluorescent equivalents for).

These are lights that are frequently used in my house so the economics of switching to LEDs makes sense.

In total I spent £60 on these bulbs - the price of LED technology has fallen significantly. I ended up buying them direct from China since that's where they are made. I could have bought them in the UK for £78.

So you may be wondering how I came to the conclusion that economic theory is flawed from this simple purchase?

Firstly VAT played a role in my purchase decision. £60 + VAT = £72.  The UK supplier would make £6 on the transaction. If there was no VAT I would have opted for the UK vendor.  Postage times from China/Hong Kong vary wildly. I've had 3 days from order and also had 3 weeks hence £6 would be worth improving the predictability. That being said I've also have 3 months for something to be delivered by Royal Mail....

So VAT is a barrier to UK GBP. My transaction with China doesn't register as GBP other than an balance of trade import.

Does that count as economic theory is flawed ? Not quite.

The real hit to economic theory is the fact I am doing the right thing by being energy conscious.

The purchase of these items is small beer in the economic impact. In total I bought 13 bulbs.
The bulbs they are replacing are high usage bulbs. Assuming these bulbs have a 6 year life (10,000 hours), which is actually on much lower than the 50,000 hours life quoted by the manufacturer, the bulbs will save £405 over that 6 year period. Not bad for £60 investment. That's based on today's electricity prices which if they rise, will improve my return on investment.

So in otherwords, the electricity company is losing out by me doing the right things. GDP will fall.

If every household in the UK (approx 22M houses), did this then it will wipe out nearly £9Bn over 6 years of GDP for the energy companies. If there was the drop in GDP then it would be deemed bad yet saving costs and conserving energy is absolutely the right thing to do. Hence my observation that economic theory is flawed.

Friday, 11 October 2013

Sales isn't important

I learnt an interesting thing today.   Sales is not important to the global population.

That's quite remarkable given the trillions of dollars of trade and GDP of countries - much of that will be as a direct result of sales.  If a company doesn't have sales it is dead so it's not that sales is not important. In fact in today's globally competitive markets I would argue that the role of sales is more important now than it's ever been.

So why am I making this claim that the global population doesn't consider sales important?

The answer is Google.  Google has a wealth of statistical information about what people are interested in.
They provide access to this information through the Google keyword tool

So let's look at some search terms entered into Google

How to sell                      85,380 global searches per month
Sales training                      1,810 global searches per month
Sales coaching                   2,060 global searches per month
Learn to sell                          110 global searches per month
Learn how to sell                     40 global searches per month

Yet the population occasionally wants to learn how to sell and this is reflected

Sell my car                      49,500 global searches per month
Sell my house                  37,210 global searches per month

I discovered this low level of interest in sales by accident.  I discovered that sewing is more interesting than sales

How to sew                  472,850 global searches per month
Bernina sewing machine   72,580 global searches per month

So a brand of sewing machine that I've never heard of is searched for 5x more popular than learning how to sell.....

I suppose the good news is than more people are interested in how to sew than celebrity news

Celebrity news              301,000 global searches per month

So what to make of this?

I'm concerned that so few people are interested in improving their sales skills.  On the one hand it's good news for me since as a sales professional I am constantly looking for new ways to improve my sales technique and that gives me the opportunity to excel compared to my  competition however it's also worrying that so few people want to improve their selling technique which means that poor standards of selling will continue.

If we assume 1 in 100 people are involved in sales  in just the UK and USA there are  3.1 million people in sales but the search popularity on Google translates into each of these people search once every 3 years.....

Even if we assume that it's only the top 20% of sales people who are proactive, that only translates to 1.5 searches each year. Hardly continuous improvement.

The quality of sales skills needs to improve yet do we overcome this apathy?

Tuesday, 3 September 2013

Winners never cheat - deceptive sales

The more I look at sales, the more deceptive practices seem to be everywhere.
We look down on sports people that take drugs and cheat and yet if we want to employ someone in sales, we seem pretty keen on selecting those that cut corners and maybe cheat.

I was recently reading a sales book that was advocating the use of false reviews on the web to build business. Sure it may increase business, but is it ethical?

The review may be written to be totally truthful but I still can't help thinking this is cheating. It's like taking drugs or cutting corners on that marathon race.

One sales practice is the switch and bait.  Grab their attention with one thing to create an expectation then switch to another for the sale.  I've had doorstep sellers use this approach - their opening line is "I'm not selling anything" when in reality the offer of a free survey is to sell something later. Winner or cheater?

So why are these practices everywhere? What is driving people to cheat?

Unfortunately it seem that sales is the answer.  Buyers have become so conditioned to sales tactics that sales people are adopting more and more extreme practices in order to gain the buyers scarce attention.

How can we stop all this deception and cheating?

Sadly that seems to be far from easy.  It's hardly possible to get all sales people to switch to ethical selling tomorrow.  Even if they did, buyers would still have preconditioned behaviours to block amorous sales advances and would still have distrust of the sales process.

I don't have thee answers but would be interested to hear how we can drum out deceptive and cheating sales practices.  It would be great to get back to a time when sales is honest and trusting.

Tuesday, 16 July 2013

Need, Want, Desire

One of the textbook sales mantra's is you can't create a need in sales.  If you're not solving a problem for your prospect then  there isn't a need. Certainly you can't force a customer into willingly buying what you're selling. You can of course force a customer into unwillingly buying what you're selling - that's high pressure sales.

It may be possible to create a need however it's unlikely to be a romantic affair. Forcing a need is a bit like rape. It's probably more about your needs for a sale than theirs.

The sales textbooks then progress to creating a want.

I need a new car.  I want a Bentley.   I could have opted for a cheap entry level car but I want a Bentley.

This is where things get interesting.  My normal perspective on sales is that it's a lot like dating. In fact my first book Romancing The Sale is based on that simple observation.

So wanting a Bentley may be completely irrational. I may not have the money.  I could be a builder so loading the Bentley up with bags of cement and other construction materials may be totally impractical. Yet I want a Bentley.

Love is blind.

When a want turns into a desire the purchase decision has shifted from a want which satisfies a need into something totally emotional and all consuming.  The buyer may be totally infatuated with the prospect of owning the item. In fact the lust and infatuation may be better experience for the customer than actually owning the item. It may turn into a disappointment. I'm sure some of you may be feeling similarly deflated about some previous romantic experiences.  The lust for your hot potential girlfriend/boyfriend was more exciting than actually having him/her.

Creating a want an progressing in into a desire for your prospect is the art of sales. To achieve this you are playing with emotions and desires which may be completely unrelated to the thing you are selling. The challenge is to find a meaningful link which triggers the desire.

As a builder I may need a practical vehicle for carrying bags of cement yet I may have the desire to show my mates that I'm a builder that's going places and I will own the construction company. Suddenly the impracticalities of a Bentley may become secondary if my desire to express my aspirations are greater than mere practicalities. OK this might seem a crazy example yet I've seen "love and desire" lead people to some very illogical decisions.

Humans are animals and we are driven by emotions. Successful sales people will be skilled and reading and playing with those emotions.

Thursday, 11 July 2013

Everyone's talking but no-one's listening

In today's world, we are all being encouraged to share our thoughts and opinions. Facebook this. Twitter that. In fact I'm doing this right now - I'm sharing my thoughts and observations on a blog.

It does seem that everyone's talking but no-one's listening.  Attention is scarce.  Un-divided attention is a rarity.  We are all eager to give our opinions but we are unwilling to spare the time to give the gift of attention to other people.  Giving your attention to some-one else is actually a very scarce resource.

So is the blog just yet another article that voices an opinion and changes nothing?  I hope not.  I genuinely believe that listening to what other people say makes a difference.  In sales it can really make a difference. It can be your differentiator. Since so few people are prepared to spare the time to listen, you say seem unique. People crave acceptance and listening elevates the speaker and shows acceptance.

Genuinely listen. I don't mean using the time when they are speaking to plan what you are going to say next. I mean really listen to what they are saying and taking it in. 

I would love you all to spend just 3 minutes a day genuinely listening to a loved one as a result of reading this post.  Listening in sales is just good  practice - it shouldn't be done with an ulterior motive anyone than you should give your 3 year old child your attention because you have an ulterior motive. 

We seem to have lost the ability to respect other people by listening. Let's make a change and promise to listen intently to each other for at least 3 minutes per day - after-all  it's probably 2 minutes 50 seconds more than you listen per day!