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Welcome to the 12th edition of 5-Minute Insights, the e-mail newsletter from Steve Wills and Sally Webb at Customer Insight Solutions (CI Solutions). We hope that in the few short minutes that it takes to scan the key messages, you will find snippets that are both informative and stimulating. If you want to find out more, we have provided links to longer articles for some of the insights.

INSIGHT IN PRACTICE

A MARGINAL SITUATION

When carrying out research, it’s easy to spend a lot of time and resources on finding and analysing a representative sample of the whole market. However, sometimes it pays to focus more on the ‘floating voters’ – those customers who don’t seem to be loyal to a specific supplier. These are the ones who are most likely to be open to new influences.

Just look at the recent US elections. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have often focused on certain groups of people – those whose opinions are most likely to be swayed.

Likewise, it can often pay dividends if you spend time looking at your marginal customers:

• Focus on the potential switchers – those customers who have no strong allegiances.
• Spend time and effort in trying to understand them, and their needs.
• A small shift in their opinion could easily tip the balance in your favour.

To explore this topic in more detail, please click here.

WHAT'S IN A NAME? (QUITE A LOT!) 

Insight teams inevitably generate masses of documents. But have you ever needed to locate the final version of an electronic file and found that you’re not sure which one it is? If you need to find something written by a colleague, or something produced several years ago, the task can become even more difficult.

The only fail-safe solution is to set specific rules for naming documents – and make sure that they’re enforced across your whole team. If you don’t, you may find little idiosyncrasies creeping in which will make it more difficult to spot the right document. Typically, your filename could include:

• The version number - v1, v2, etc.
• The initials of the author
• The date (starting with the year and month)

Here are three helpful hints:

• Include a code for the type of document in your agreed file naming convention
• At the end of a project, create a file with all the final documents in it
• Alternatively, create a master overview document

Click here for more details!

DOMINATING DEREK

This is the latest in a set of 'pen portraits' of different types of internal clients, and the issues you may need to address when working with them.

Dominating Derek

Derek is usually a senior person who has a lot of clout – and isn’t afraid to use it! As a result, he may tend to set ridiculous deadlines. And he will think nothing of suddenly changing a deadline and bringing it forward.

Unfortunately, this can all cause chaos for you and your team and can undermine staff morale. Because Derek is in a senior position, dealing with him can potentially be very difficult.

Firstly, you need to establish your own credibility by ensuring that all of your work is of excellent quality and always delivered on time. You can then choose the best way of approaching him about unreasonable deadlines:

• Try for a postponement
• Suggest an initial summary with the rest of the information to follow
• Make him choose between different priorities

For more ideas about how you can cope with Derek’s demands, click here.

DEVELOPING SKILLS

ORDER! ORDER!

We all know speakers that can bore their audiences with hundreds of PowerPoint slides. However, cutting down the number of slides won’t necessarily reduce the boredom factor. In many situations, it’s not the length of the presentation that’s the problem – it’s the order in which the information is given.

Most of us were taught at school to present the results of a science project in a specific order: Objectives - Methods – Results - Conclusions. However, this approach is unsuitable for most business presentations and sometimes its only merit is as an instant cure for insomnia!

The best way to present a lot of results is to:

• Start with a short, sharp summary of the issues that your presentation will address
• Then go straight to the answers
• Follow these up with the supporting data and the details

This will help to ensure that everyone end ups with the same messages. Those who are only interested in the key results can leave early, whilst those who like the details can stay and hear the whole story.

To find out more about why this approach is so effective, please click here

HOW CLEAR IS YOUR CRYSTAL BALL?

Forecasting future events - and particularly their timing - is notoriously difficult.  The July/August 2007 edition of the Harvard Business Review carried an article called ‘Six Rules For Effective Forecasting’ by Paul Saffo. This focused on the need to look for ‘weak signals’.

Saffo shows that quantity is often better than quality when it comes to predicting the future: it’s better to rely on numerous weak signals rather than one or two strong ones. This also applies when forecasting the likely impact of new technology. To find these weak signals, you’ll need to explore the history behind the technology.

A good example involves the development of 3D interfaces and virtual worlds. There have been numerous ‘weak signals’ over the past 20 years that suggest that this kind of virtual technology is on the verge of a take-off.  

The general lessons are:

• Don’t make forecasts from just one or two pieces of evidence, no matter how convincing.
• If you can see lots of weak signals that all lead to the same conclusions, you can start to predict that something may actually happen.

To see a more detailed example of the importance of weak signals, please click here.

TIP OF THE MONTH

PUTTING YOU IN THE PICTURE

How do you get a sample of an Internet page or part of a spreadsheet or some other application and import it as a picture into a PowerPoint presentation? This may seem obvious – but many people don’t know how to do it.

The answer is: simply call up the page, document or application you require onto your PC and then press the Print Screen (Prt Sc or similar) key on your keyboard. It will take an image of your whole screen and put it on your clipboard. Then go to the PowerPoint slide where you want the image to appear and paste it in (either press Ctrl+V or right click and select ‘Paste’). The screen shot will appear. 

Be warned – the resulting image will usually be much larger than the slide, so zoom out to say 33% to show the whole image. You can then easily click on it and drag in the corners to reduce its size. Alternatively, select the ‘Crop’ option from the picture toolbar to crop it if you only want to see part of the image. Here’s an example of an image of part of the BBC website Home page that was captured in this way:

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