July 7, 2010 at 12:28How did we overcome this crisis?
My company was also affected by the crisis. As, however, and all. I know many executives of many companies and I don’t know anyone who the crisis would not touch. And those who say “everything is fine with us” are just bluffing. No, of course, I think there are those on whom the crisis has not affected, and even those who have begun to do better, but there are only a few. And this post, apparently, is not for them. How to return the company to the pre-crisis level? What exactly is to be done to prevent stagnation? I will share my experience, because everything worked out for me.
However, not all have to tell. I know that competitors revere me. But I think the main idea and approach to solving this problem will be clear.
To be understood what will be discussed. Right hereWe posted the company's results for 2009. There is a picture from my desktop. There are two main indicators of the company. The company's revenue and the number of initial appeals of new customers. Comments are almost redundant. It shows that by mid-2009, the company's revenue had dropped significantly, and the number of initial customer requests fell to almost zero at the beginning of the year. These two graphs are constantly in front of my eyes now. So as not to relax.
At first, I was referring to the drop in revenue in the style of "well, the crisis is, everything falls for everyone." Then I got tired of it and I realized that if nothing is done, the situation could go too far.
I decided in my own company to implement the so-called BSC system and try in practice what it is. The task was, it would seem, simple - to stop the decline in revenue and make it grow by the end of the year.
Everything seemed to be simple. Here you have a goal. You need to achieve it. But how? What exactly needs to be done? Very often, in high offices, they simply plan financial indicators and ... that's it. Then these financial plans go down, there they look down at them, shrug their shoulders and work “as before”. Then, in the same high offices, plans are reduced downward, because "there are objective reasons" or there is simply a reduction in staff or other measures that fundamentally do not solve the problem. In short, of course, it is possible to plan financial indicators, but it is not financial plans that need to be conveyed to the final employees, but others. You can plan financial indicators as much as you like, but if ordinary employees don’t understand what exactlythey must do to achieve them, it is worthless to such planning.
We worked in three main areas.
1. The system of attracting new customers. It is this system that will ultimately lead to an increase in the company's revenue.
2. Product improvement. He should get better in every way. And just better and better than competitors.
3. Labor productivity. It is already high with us, but it should become even higher.
The target tree looked approximately like in the picture, only in much more detail, right down to specific actions. In general, everything is clear from the picture - to achieve a specific goal there should not be a confusion, everything should be clear, clear and unambiguous. All employees of the company should understand what we are doing, whywe do when we do and who specifically does.
There were some changes in the process in the process, but overall it is. For each task, the deadlines, performers, responsible.
For example, one of the intermediate goals is to increase the number of initial customer requests by the end of the year by 3 times. Looking ahead, I’ll say that it turned out not three times, but more than ten.
To do this, we clearly divided the channels through which we receive new customers. The main channel is, of course, our site. But visitors get to the site in different ways. These paths were clearly divided and goals were set for each path. How many customers should come in which way.
One way, for example, is context on search engines. They studied it more densely, all ads were rated by efficiency and conversion, ineffective ones either rewrote or threw away. Slightly increased the budget for the context and expanded the number of search phrases.
We carefully worked out the rest of the ways, each of which worked out specific actions and tasks.
In order to significantly increase the number of initial visits, site traffic by the end of the year needed to be tripled. But what’s the point if you have three times as many visitors to your site, but on average a visitor spends 5 seconds on a site? The effect of this increase will be zero. Therefore, one of the main sub-goals was to triple the time the visitor spends on the site. Increased in the end six times. The time that a visitor spends on the site, in our opinion, is much more important than the number of visitors. Therefore, here the goal was divided into three - the number of visitors, the time that the visitor spends on the site and the new site design. As it turned out, design means a lot.
In order to delay the visitor on the site, he needs to offer something new and interesting. And we began to write interesting articles, make video materials and post it all on the site. I discovered an amazing thing - when you start writing interesting articles "for people" in a normal and understandable language, both the reader and the media begin to pay attention to your materials. This happened in our case.
A.S. Pushkin, who once said about amateurs to complicate things: “these people will never say“ early in the morning ”, they write“ barely the first rays of the rising sun illuminated the eastern edges of the azure sky ”.
Several publications at once asked us to publish our articles on their pages. Thus, we received an additional influx of visitors. We have established relations with publication managers and continue to publish regularly.
We did not make video materials in the “about nothing” style, but high-quality material that is interesting to real users. As a result, some users lingered on the site for hours.
Completely redid the site design. We worked with designers on this issue for almost six months. The new design seemed simple and fresh to us. Exactly what is needed.
Work to increase the visitor’s time on the site continues today. For example, if earlier users simply downloaded PDF instructions from the site, now they will be in html directly on the site.
Of course, we’ve also taken up search engine optimization more carefully. We stopped relations with a company that previously “untwisted” the site and began to do it on their own. They just found a competent person who guided us (and continues to instruct) on the true path, listened to his recommendations, which seemed very practical to us. By the way, also a habrovets. He transferred the site to a new, modern engine for us, so that we would be able to properly and efficiently manage all content.
They threw from the site the texts that the previous company posted with us for promotion. Because they were texts for robots, not for humans. Yes, for some positions the site has dropped a little, but timevisitors increased and the number of failures decreased (we also monitor the number of failures). Because when a person comes to the site and sees high-quality, interesting material, it is much better than when he sees solid tags and uninteresting text.
More often they began to tell society about themselves. It turned out that many are interested. They began to blog on the hub, by the way.
Completely redid the product interface. They developed a huge amount of useful functionality, which simply did not reach hands in the "fat" time. This part of the project lasted about eight months.
Another area that we have worked hard all this time is to increase the productivity of company employees. It was already quite high with us, but it was labor productivity that was put at the forefront of the company. For this, a new system of technical support for customers was introduced, the system for installing new versions of customers was fully automated, and the system for managing the settings of our product for customers was automated. It just saved a huge amount of time. As a result, a lot of time was freed up and we were able to devote this time to the development of new functionality. And the product has become more perfect and labor productivity has grown significantly.
Для того, чтобы достичь какой-то цели, она должна быть конвертирована в простые и понятные задачи, которые вполне выполнимы сотрудниками за вполне определенное время. Задачи должны быть простыми и измеримыми в количественном выражении.
Разумеется, все это можно сделать, только если:
1. Вашему упорству нет предела и вы умеете доводить начатое до логического завершения.
2. Вы не боитесь перемен.
3. Вы уверены, что ваш продукт хорош.
However, not all have to tell. I know that competitors revere me. But I think the main idea and approach to solving this problem will be clear.
To be understood what will be discussed. Right hereWe posted the company's results for 2009. There is a picture from my desktop. There are two main indicators of the company. The company's revenue and the number of initial appeals of new customers. Comments are almost redundant. It shows that by mid-2009, the company's revenue had dropped significantly, and the number of initial customer requests fell to almost zero at the beginning of the year. These two graphs are constantly in front of my eyes now. So as not to relax.
At first, I was referring to the drop in revenue in the style of "well, the crisis is, everything falls for everyone." Then I got tired of it and I realized that if nothing is done, the situation could go too far.
I decided in my own company to implement the so-called BSC system and try in practice what it is. The task was, it would seem, simple - to stop the decline in revenue and make it grow by the end of the year.
Everything seemed to be simple. Here you have a goal. You need to achieve it. But how? What exactly needs to be done? Very often, in high offices, they simply plan financial indicators and ... that's it. Then these financial plans go down, there they look down at them, shrug their shoulders and work “as before”. Then, in the same high offices, plans are reduced downward, because "there are objective reasons" or there is simply a reduction in staff or other measures that fundamentally do not solve the problem. In short, of course, it is possible to plan financial indicators, but it is not financial plans that need to be conveyed to the final employees, but others. You can plan financial indicators as much as you like, but if ordinary employees don’t understand what exactlythey must do to achieve them, it is worthless to such planning.
We worked in three main areas.
1. The system of attracting new customers. It is this system that will ultimately lead to an increase in the company's revenue.
2. Product improvement. He should get better in every way. And just better and better than competitors.
3. Labor productivity. It is already high with us, but it should become even higher.
The target tree looked approximately like in the picture, only in much more detail, right down to specific actions. In general, everything is clear from the picture - to achieve a specific goal there should not be a confusion, everything should be clear, clear and unambiguous. All employees of the company should understand what we are doing, whywe do when we do and who specifically does.
There were some changes in the process in the process, but overall it is. For each task, the deadlines, performers, responsible.
For example, one of the intermediate goals is to increase the number of initial customer requests by the end of the year by 3 times. Looking ahead, I’ll say that it turned out not three times, but more than ten.
To do this, we clearly divided the channels through which we receive new customers. The main channel is, of course, our site. But visitors get to the site in different ways. These paths were clearly divided and goals were set for each path. How many customers should come in which way.
One way, for example, is context on search engines. They studied it more densely, all ads were rated by efficiency and conversion, ineffective ones either rewrote or threw away. Slightly increased the budget for the context and expanded the number of search phrases.
We carefully worked out the rest of the ways, each of which worked out specific actions and tasks.
In order to significantly increase the number of initial visits, site traffic by the end of the year needed to be tripled. But what’s the point if you have three times as many visitors to your site, but on average a visitor spends 5 seconds on a site? The effect of this increase will be zero. Therefore, one of the main sub-goals was to triple the time the visitor spends on the site. Increased in the end six times. The time that a visitor spends on the site, in our opinion, is much more important than the number of visitors. Therefore, here the goal was divided into three - the number of visitors, the time that the visitor spends on the site and the new site design. As it turned out, design means a lot.
In order to delay the visitor on the site, he needs to offer something new and interesting. And we began to write interesting articles, make video materials and post it all on the site. I discovered an amazing thing - when you start writing interesting articles "for people" in a normal and understandable language, both the reader and the media begin to pay attention to your materials. This happened in our case.
A.S. Pushkin, who once said about amateurs to complicate things: “these people will never say“ early in the morning ”, they write“ barely the first rays of the rising sun illuminated the eastern edges of the azure sky ”.
Several publications at once asked us to publish our articles on their pages. Thus, we received an additional influx of visitors. We have established relations with publication managers and continue to publish regularly.
We did not make video materials in the “about nothing” style, but high-quality material that is interesting to real users. As a result, some users lingered on the site for hours.
Completely redid the site design. We worked with designers on this issue for almost six months. The new design seemed simple and fresh to us. Exactly what is needed.
Work to increase the visitor’s time on the site continues today. For example, if earlier users simply downloaded PDF instructions from the site, now they will be in html directly on the site.
Of course, we’ve also taken up search engine optimization more carefully. We stopped relations with a company that previously “untwisted” the site and began to do it on their own. They just found a competent person who guided us (and continues to instruct) on the true path, listened to his recommendations, which seemed very practical to us. By the way, also a habrovets. He transferred the site to a new, modern engine for us, so that we would be able to properly and efficiently manage all content.
They threw from the site the texts that the previous company posted with us for promotion. Because they were texts for robots, not for humans. Yes, for some positions the site has dropped a little, but timevisitors increased and the number of failures decreased (we also monitor the number of failures). Because when a person comes to the site and sees high-quality, interesting material, it is much better than when he sees solid tags and uninteresting text.
More often they began to tell society about themselves. It turned out that many are interested. They began to blog on the hub, by the way.
Completely redid the product interface. They developed a huge amount of useful functionality, which simply did not reach hands in the "fat" time. This part of the project lasted about eight months.
Another area that we have worked hard all this time is to increase the productivity of company employees. It was already quite high with us, but it was labor productivity that was put at the forefront of the company. For this, a new system of technical support for customers was introduced, the system for installing new versions of customers was fully automated, and the system for managing the settings of our product for customers was automated. It just saved a huge amount of time. As a result, a lot of time was freed up and we were able to devote this time to the development of new functionality. And the product has become more perfect and labor productivity has grown significantly.
conclusions
Для того, чтобы достичь какой-то цели, она должна быть конвертирована в простые и понятные задачи, которые вполне выполнимы сотрудниками за вполне определенное время. Задачи должны быть простыми и измеримыми в количественном выражении.
Разумеется, все это можно сделать, только если:
1. Вашему упорству нет предела и вы умеете доводить начатое до логического завершения.
2. Вы не боитесь перемен.
3. Вы уверены, что ваш продукт хорош.