Basically, businesses that are into tangible products are on a dead end today. It is because they don’t have an idea on how to create a successful product. Most of the businesses today only adds more features on a certain product and increase its price. They market it as new products even if it is only an improvement of the latter.

It is true that we are lacking enough minds to create a successful product, but deceiving the public is not something that businesses should do. The richest man in the Philippines once said that you have to be honest with your customers if you want them to stay and be loyal in your brand. Well, how can you expect them to stay and be loyal to your brand if you are not giving them what they deserve?

If you wanted to build a successful product, here are some of the important things that you need to know.

Put Innovation as your Product’s Foundation

When creating a product, you should always put innovation as the foundation because in the end, everything comes down on how your product is unique from the others. It is really hard to create a unique product and it is also the reason why every company spends a lot of time, effort and money to create a new product.

Instead of wasting time thinking of adding new features on an already existing product, think of a new product. It will take time, but you don’t have to release new products on a regular basis. You can always add features and tell them that it will be a new addition to the products. You don’t have to add features and increase the price of the item.

Your Product should be Functional

The term “Functional” is not only for electronic products. It can be applied to all the other products on the market today. Let’s say that you already have an idea on what to product, the question is how can you make it functional? You cannot sell an idea. Your idea should be functional if you want people to buy it. If your product will not live up to what you are claiming, it will never be successful no matter what you do.

If you think that the idea of the product is good enough or the design, it should be functional first. It should be a step by step process. You can determine the functions of a product unless you innovate first. You cannot make a design unless you do the first two.

Think of an Attractive Design

Don’t overdo the design because you are not selling a product just because of designs. Make it look attractive and make sure that the functions will not be affected in any way. This is the last step in the successful product pyramid. Even if it is only about the design, it plays a very important role in the marketing of the product.

Many business owners and Filipino billionaires know about this, but only a few are using this. It should be done by business owners if they want to make a successful product.

As procurement professionals we have to continually demonstrate our value to our organization by focusing on the key activities that deliver the most added benefits. What gets in the way of doing this is the myriad of other things that we have to do each day. Often there is more to do than we are able to achieve in the time available to us.

At this point we need a good process for prioritizing our tasks, planning our work and working our plan. The best analogy I have ever heard on prioritizing work came from Stephen Covey; it is called the “rocks, pebbles and sand” analogy for time management.

The story as told by Mr Covey is that an expert was addressing a group of business students. He reached beneath the desk to produce a large glass container and proceeded to fill it with rocks. When he could fit no more in he asked the group whether the container was full to which the group replied yes it was.

He then produced some pebbles and through a process of shaking the container managed to fit them all in the gaps between the rocks. Similarly, he managed to fill the gaps between the pebbles with sand. The group then thought the container was full until the expert successfully poured a jug of water into the container.

The lesson of this story is clear. If the container represents the time we have available to us in a period of time and the rocks, pebbles, sand and water represent the tasks we have to carry out then we can only do them all if we do the rocks first and the rest in order of size. In other words, start with your biggest tasks first and only go to the next level of tasks once the big ones are complete. If you do the tasks the other way round, you will never get to the big rocks (tasks).

So what are the big rocks that procurement professionals need to do first before they give their attention to the smaller tasks? I would suggest the following:-

• Understanding your supply markets – what is their scope, who are the major players, are they growing or declining, is there scope to bring in new entrants and so on.
• Understanding the demand for products and services in your organization and how this relates to your supply market knowledge. For example, is there a need to develop a particular market by stimulating innovation or attracting new entrants?
• Organizing price and cost analyses and carrying out bench-marking exercises to understand the opportunities for savings. This might be linked to value analysis and value engineering exercises.
• Carrying out supply chain risk assessments so that you understand the potential vulnerability for your organization and then put in place effective monitoring and mitigation.
• Working with key suppliers to bring about product, service and cost innovations, improve delivery processes and carry out joint planning and product/service co-design (all part of a supplier relationship management program).
• Building effective working relationships with other parts of your organization.
• Measuring performance (both the procurement organization and suppliers) as the basis of designing and delivering improvement programs.
• Continually improving your capability through knowledge exchange, training courses and coaching.

Do these big rock activities well and you will show your organization what great value you can add. This then becomes a “no brainer” case for investing in more resource to do the other, smaller tasks if you can’t do them all yourself.

For so many decades we’ve been taught that Intellectual Intelligence (IQ) is what gets us places in the corporate world, yet nowadays we are seeing that it is more Emotional Intelligence (EQ) that gets us places. IQ is what gets us our position, EQ is what enables us to keep our position and become a great leader.

However we are not taught EQ skills at school, nor at Varsity and certainly not in the workplace. At least not until recently when mentoring and coaching started becoming a profession. And even then, it has only really been aimed at the Senior managers and Executives of an organization.

Its a known fact that the higher up the corporate ladder you climb, it is more about EQ and less about IQ as your day to day duties largely revolve around managing people, teams and divisions to ensure deliverables and business objectives are met.

So what is being done to help the newly appointed junior managers to develop their EQ skills and become better managers and leaders?

If they are the future of a business and are being groomed to take the lead at some point, then surely it should be key for them to as eligible for the development of EQ skills?

There is a huge need to help up and coming managers develop their EQ skills to become better managers. Often they struggle with the transition from being on the same level as their peers to at times having to manage those very same peers.

By becoming self aware of our own emotions and what drives our actions and behavior, we can better self manage as well as others who come into our space by being conscious and aware of the relational space between two people. This is termed as Self Mastery.

If we can practice self mastery in our personal and peer relationships, not only do we become a better, more authentic person, but we also have better quality relationships. Self Mastery teaches us important skills such as: effective communication, hearing vs. listening, conflict and diversity management, empathy, compassion and understanding. It also helps create trust and safety in relationships.

And this is where HR departments can play a big role in creating an environment that enables mentoring and coaching as part of everyone’s career path to help create more authentic, emotionally attuned leaders resulting in a healthier working environment and happier employees all round.

We are living in the internet age and for your business to be successful you should ensure that you have a strong web presence.

The first thing that you need to do is to have a website. Here you need to purchase a unique domain name and sign up for a web host. Although, there are many free web hosts and portfolio sites that you can use, you should avoid using them.

This is because such sites tend to make your business look unprofessional. To be on the safe side you should always go the paid hosting plans. The good side is that the hosting plans are usually cheap and almost every small business can afford them.

Once you have done this you should now design a stylish and user-friendly website. If you don’t have the skills to design a website, you should consider hiring a professional who will do it for you. To be successful you should ensure that your website has a current design.

In addition to having a website, you should also ensure that you have profile pages on the popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.

The main function of the social networks is to help you communicate with your customers. To ensure that you are able to easily communicate, you should put links of your social profiles on your website.

To increase your followers on social media, you should share content that is beneficial to your customers and clients. When sharing content, you should be very careful and avoid spamming your readers.

If you are a lover of videos, you should highly consider using YouTube videos as a way of marketing your business. The good side is that it’s very easy to create the videos; however, if you don’t have the skills to create them, you should hire a professional to do it for you.

Another great way of having a strong online presence is by purchasing advertising space that is relevant to your readers and followers. A great way of going about it is buying advertising space on Google. You can also write articles and post them on websites that are relevant to your readers.

Although, you might be desperate of having a strong online presence, you should avoid deceitful ways of marketing. For example, you should avoid “sock-puppeting.” This is because such methods can easily create serious backlash against you which would be devastating to your business.