Issue 20 - Five Minute Insight - Customer Insight Solutions



	Issue 20 - January 2009 CONTENTS Introduction Insight in Practice - New Year's Resolutions - Extra Strong MINT - on making plans - Meet The Team Member - Future-Focussed Freda Developing Skills - New Year Skills Review - Making A Habit Of......Succeeding Through Synergy - Tip of the Month - Google Alerts Training and Feedback - Spring courses - New Dates - Book now INTRODUCTION Welcome to the latest 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 NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS Happy New Year! This is a time when we should all resolve to do something different or better during the year ahead. So what resolutions would be suitable for an Insight team? Here are our Top Five suggestions: 1. Say “No” more often – Otherwise you may find that you don’t have sufficient time for more important projects. 2. Plan your communications first – Think who you will need to communicate to (and how) before a project – it may even change the way in which you run it! 3. Make time to think – Put aside some thinking time, when you know you won’t be disturbed. 4. Review last year’s projects – Findings can easily be lost and recommendations ignored. Go back over recent key projects and find out what happened. 5. Share insight across the team – Take time in group meetings to actually share what each of you has learnt from your work. For more details on each of these points, please click here. EXTRA STRONG MINT - MAKING PLANS WORK Now is the time to look at your plans for the year ahead. But how often do you review your portfolio in terms of what your organisation actually needs rather than what it constantly demands? One way is to categorise all the areas of your work using MINT! This stands for: Mapping – Map out an overview of each key market. This will provide some important context as well as many immediate answers to questions. Issue investigation – For daily problems, ask: “Do we know the answer from previous work?” Then assess the size of the issue and the value of finding an answer. New product development – You need to try and be involved with new product development at an early stage in the planning cycle. Tracking –Most organisations want some form of performance tracking. But you need to use the right sources if this it to be cost-effective. For more details of how to apply MINT, please click here. MEET THE TEAM MEMBER - FUTURE-FOCUSED FREDA During this series, we are looking at people who typify four different styles of behaviour. We will use two examples of each style: one whose approach has more impact upon other people and one that has more impact upon the task in hand. Future-Focused Freda The style This month we turn to Freda, who is an Expresser. Unlike Party Animal Pete (featured last July), she tends to be business-focused rather than people-focused. Freda is a visionary, with loads of ideas - and she seldom stops for breath. She can be inspirational and very effective at getting everybody on board. The substance However, Freda isn’t particularly good at following through issues. Sometimes, her ideas may be impractical. At other times, she forgets that the devil is in the detail and can easily get caught out. The solution Freda may just need to slow down at times and focus on planning – or team up with somebody else who can help her. She needs to stand back and take a look at the big picture, and may need help in delivering the practicalities of her ideas. To find out more about Freda, please click here. DEVELOPING SKILLS NEW YEAR SKILLS REVIEW The New Year is a good time for taking stock of your skill set - on both a personal level and across your team. Here are our suggestions of five important abilities that an effective team should have: Looking after key accounts. It’s not what you know but who you know that will ultimately determine your impact within your organisation. Focusing on key issues. Ensure that work that’s taking up your time addresses key business issues - all of your work must have the potential to make a difference. Summarising information. Don’t get lost in the detail. You may want to share more information, but always try to start with a short, sharp summary. Evaluating opportunities. Your insights will be more credible if you can put a value on them. Join our training course to find out how to do this! Headlining your results. Grab people’s attention with short, sharp headlines so that your key messages aren’t lost. Our Impact Writing course could help you… Please click here for a more in-depth exploration of each of these areas, or click here to see our available courses which will help you with these skills. MAKING A HABIT OF..... SUCCEEDING THROUGH SYNERGY This is the penultimate article in our series based around Steven R Covey’s book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." 1+1=3 Covey’s definition of synergy is that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts... each of the parts combines to create new and exciting unexpected discoveries that were not possible before.’ Benefiting from synergy He suggests that synergy enables new things to be created. It’s the essence of team spirit – i.e. people can achieve more as a group working in harmony than they ever could by themselves. Synergy and insight In terms of insight, the benefits of synergy are one of the great outcomes of good teamwork, if the other habits are being put into practice. The results of working together can be greater, more creative and more far-reaching than any output that could be achieved alone. Your team will have different areas of expertise, experience, and personality types – giving you a great opportunity for benefiting from different views. For more detail click here. TIP OF THE MONTH GOOGLE ALERTS Have you tried using Google alerts? If not, give them a try! They’re free and come straight to your Inbox. If you want to monitor a competitor; developments about a particular product; or news about a specific person, just call up Google alerts and tell them what you want to look for. Firstly, either key ‘Google alerts’ into Google, or go to www.google.com/alerts. You can then specify what you want to search for and how often you want the results to be emailed to you. One further tip – the email you get will always start with the words ‘Google alert’ in the subject line. You can easily use Outlook rules to automatically put the alerts into another folder instead of clogging up your Inbox. My thanks to Juliet Jessop at St James Place for that one! If anyone else has some great tips please just let me know...... TRAINING As part of our regular 6-monthly programme, these are the dates for next set of courses in the spring. Book now to be sure of a place. Or contact us if you want to run one as an in-house course. Insight management and communications: vision to reality: 26th February 2009 Sharing the vision of good insight management, with key processes and skills to help you on this journey. "Loads of useful learnings! I've applied one already today" Delegate Open Course 2007 Commercial thinking: 26th March 2009 Enabling you to present your proposals and recommendations in £s not %s, to raise your profile and impact with marketing colleagues, finance and the Board. "Probably the most useful course I've ever been on" In-house course - Professional services How to communicate for maximum impact: 12th March 2009 Hands-on training to increase the impact of all your written insight communications, from emails and presentations, to reports and newsletters. "Energising course with great practical applications" In-house course - Financial services Click here for more details FEEDBACK We want 5-Minute Insights to be as useful as possible. That's where you come in! Please email us at feedback@cisolutions.co.uk with any comments you have about its content, its style, or with requests for items that you would like to see. If you have a difficult problem that you are having trouble solving - such as a Marketing Director who insists on ignoring unwelcome insights; or an issue that is challenging your team on the journey towards insight - please let us know. If we can make helpful suggestions we will, and if several people have a similar problem, we will write an article for 5-Minute Insights. If you would like to pass this newsletter on to your colleagues, please feel free to do so. Equally, if you know anyone who would like to be added to the mailing list, please let us know. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.