Archives for category: Communication
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Why is the News All Bad?

October 24, 2016 //
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Why is the news all bad? Why do the media, 90 per cent of the time, lead with war, murders, attacks, death, political wranglings and nastiness, accidents or missing people? The more dramatic the better? Why do they save the good news and the good vibe stories for the end, positioning them as afterthoughts or here’s-something-quirky-fluffy-or-engaging-to-pay-lip-service-to-the-idea-of-balance pieces?

What is it about the media that confirms and prolongs the notion that bad news is good news? And what is it about us that we legitimise and condone it by continuing to buy the newspapers and tune in to the air time? For us, in our everyday lives and loves, no news is often good news. For them, no news is worse than good news. It means they have nothing to say, nothing to fill the void with.

It beats me. I try not to be saddled with the bad news. I avoid getting sucked into a good vibe vortex. I don’t watch the news on television, news that is pushed to me – whether I like it or not – in the old broadcasting style. I select the news I want to read on the web. OK, so it’s still controlled and prioritised by the same organisations, but I feel like I’m pulling the stories that I’m interested in, in the order I prefer.

In all of journalism has there ever been an editor who has decided to achieve a genuine balance of good and bad, and even lead with the good stuff, to lift his or her readership and ultimately the region out of this misery funk? Is it even possible to start a movement that becomes seismic this way? Probably not an example who has lasted, since circulation and ratings would have tanked in the short term, and the powers that be would never have stayed the course.

Perhaps it simply feeds our constant need for affirmation that there’s always someone less well off than us, because they’ve been killed, orphaned, injured, marginalised, threatened, beaten, ripped off or otherwise suffered at the hands of others or from the fickle hand of fate.

So perhaps we’re the problem, or is there no chance for us to change?

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

Welcome Back

October 21, 2016 //
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In 2000, I was in San Diego, California, for a conference. The day before the conference started, I had some time to kill and I needed a new travel bag with wheels and one of those extendable handles. So I went to the local mall with a colleague to do some research.

We split up and I went into a couple of shops. I nodded my hellos to the staff and I didn’t speak any more to a sales assistant. In the second store found the bag I thought I was looking for. I left the store and went to go find my buddy for a second opinion, as he travelled for work more than I did.

20 minutes later we came back into the store. ‘Welcome back’, said the sales assistant, a handsome African American bloke in his late-20’s. The store was Sharper Image.

What struck was that the guy remembered me. When he said ‘Welcome back’, I took the unspoken part of this to mean:

  • I noticed you come in before
  • You’re important to us
  • We pay attention to our prospects and customers
  • I want you to know that
  • We want to serve you so that you can become a customer

I bought the bag.

I still have the bag.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Fear and Greed Revisited

October 19, 2016 //
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Some time ago, quite a long time go, I wrote about fear and greed.

It was my Dad’s basic premise that much of human behaviour can be distilled into the explanation that it’s driven by these two forces.

If you look around what’s happening in the world and in your country today, or at least the stories that are being selected and channeled to us by the media, an uncomfortably large number of them are still confirming this basic hypothesis. It’s all a bit depressing if you spend too much time on it.

Then again, the vast majority of attention is hogged by leaders in their field: world leaders and politicians, army generals, captains of industry, entertainment a-listers, terrorists and arch criminals all make the news. Maybe it’s the people who have got to the very top of their group are the ones exhibiting these base characteristics. Maybe they’ve had to.

When I look around at my fellow human beings that make up the 99% of us, I don’t see the fear and greed so much.

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Categories Communication, General

Best B2B Sales Deck Ever

October 17, 2016 //
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The other day a colleague pointed me towards an article he’d seen by a chap called Andy Raskin on LinkedIn. It was a recounting and generalising around the best sales deck he’s ever seen. You can read the full article here.

If you can’t get to the article now, I’d recommend you bookmark it for another time. For now, though, the essence of the article is that the best flow of a sales deck, predominantly for B2B and disruptive technologies, touches on 5 key milestones. I’ve written about this a lot, and the following flow definitely hits all the major points.

Here are the 5 milestones:

1) Set the scene with a major change event in the world

2) Show that there’ll be winners who embrace this change event, and losers who don’t

3) Show them what success looks like when you’ve got there – what Andy calls ‘teasing the promised land’

4) Introduce your features as ‘magic gifts’ to get them to the promised land

5) Demonstrate your evidence that you can get them there, ie you’ve done it for others

Nothing new here perhaps, but it brings the prospect along the journey in an exciting way and doesn’t slam them on the defensive or put them off progressing because it’s too complex/scary/hard. As I said, the full article is here and well worth a read.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Dublin Airport

September 28, 2016 //
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I’ve spoken before about how the world’s airports have a lot to learn from Irish airports, in terms of their free wifi, free drinking water and general welcoming ambience.

Well, you can add to that the speed with which they expedite people.

Recently, I landed on an arriving flight at 8:59am. We taxied to the gate, got off and I walked swiftly down the travelators through to passport control. I then went to baggage claim, used the bathroom and picked up my checked-in bag. I walked out of the terminal to the coach to take me home.

Nothing unusual in that. Except that it was 9:17am. 18 minutes had passed from runway to coach. This was during rush hour in the country’s biggest airport. It means that my bags were unloaded and moved from the plane to the baggage conveyor in no more than 10 minutes, probably 7 or 8.

In a world where we often moan about the time it take us to get from outside the terminal to the runway, and vice versa, my 18 minutes stands in stark contrast.

Phenomenal stuff.

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Categories Communication, Marketing

To Do So, Go To

September 26, 2016 //
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I was reading a software manual the other day – I know, very rock and roll – and a sentence began ‘To do so, go to…’. All quite legitimate and grammatical. Also, written by an organisation that doesn’t use English as a first language and whose author was Eastern European, betrayed by a few other incidents of phrasing elsewhere in the document.

It got me thinking about our fabled, ancient, and multi-rooted English language, and how impenetrable it must seem to learners of the language. Not of the spoken language, but of the written language. The dictionary must be constantly at hand.

We don’t even think about it as native speakers, but right there you’ve got five two-letter words, all ending in ‘o’. In order, one’s a infinitive prefix, one’s an infinitive verb, one’s a kind of adverbial thingummybob that can mean a bunch of things depending on where it is in the sentence, the next one’s an imperative verb and the last one’s a preposition. Phew!

Not only that, but two of the words have completely different vowel soundings to the others.

They’re testimony to how the language has evolved over the years.

Congratulations to the writer for getting it right, but, boy, we don’t make it easy. I won’t even get started on two, two, sew and sow…

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Categories Communication, Language

Video Calls

September 23, 2016 //
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I vividly remember the Sam Mendes-directed launch video for the Apple iPhone 4. This was the democratisation of video calls. High quality video calls reducing the geographical distance between people. Kirk to Enterprise had become a reality.

We’d already had Skype video calls for a while of course, between computers. But now it was for mobiles and tablets.

It promised so much, and has probably delivered in places with an abundance of one critical ingredient in the successful video call.

Bandwidth.

I travel quite a bit, and miss my family when I do. Yet, I find the Facetime call is an increasingly frustrating – rather than satisfying – experience. We live in the country, and the broadband is 30MB ‘down’ in theory, but the contention is 1-to-48 so the video element at the family end is jittery, or falls out, or freezes.

This is also a problem in business where company networks have insufficient bandwidth. You don’t need video so much on business calls, but it’s more important to connect visually with people you love, I find.

So, until our contention improves, I’m leaving video calls and going back to audio. The kids are less distracted and you get a better quality of conversation. I’ll simply have to imagine their faces better.

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Categories Communication, Language

Product Descriptions

September 21, 2016 //
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In the world of high tech, the product description is a vital document. It’s the link between inside and out. It connects the worlds of product management and product marketing, like the bridge between the left and right sides of the brain.

The product marketer has the job of enabling the sales force and partners to sell the new product, and customers to buy it, with the right messaging and assets to support the buying process.

To do this well, the product marketer relies on a good product description. A well-written product description is the base document that feeds internal enablement documents, the data sheet, website content and more detailed pieces of collateral.

Despite this, it’s sometimes hard to get a good product description. Perhaps this is because the product management function is more internal and technical, and being able to translate this into something that resonates with the customer is more external and business-oriented. When you don’t get a product description, it tends to make your job as a a product marketer very difficult, and it tends to compress the timeframe for generating the content.

The product description needn’t be a huge document; in fact, the simpler the better in my opinion. Here’s my suggested outline of what a good product description should cover:

  • What the product or product enhancement is
  • What it does (feature/function)
  • Which customer and prospect audiences it’s for
  • What it can and can’t do
  • How we should message it 
  • How we will sell it (including customer fit and pricing if relevant)
  • How it stacks up against the competition
  • How it will be implemented and supported
  • What success looks like for the product

Not too difficult, and key to success.

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Single Point of Signal Failure

September 19, 2016 //
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As I’m sure you’re aware, a single point of failure is a bad thing. If the single point fails, the whole system fails. That’s why we try to build in contingencies.

I was reminded of this – and if you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that transportation and travel are recurrent themes – on a recent train journey into England’s capital. I was joining the train at Didcot, a 45-minute run into London and favoured as a daily commute by thousands of residents in the Didcot area.

The trains to London run every 15 minutes, and so they need to, to get the volume of people to London for work. A signal failure in the west of country cancelled one of these services and delayed another. This led to passengers being 5- and 6-deep on the platform edge. Because of the delay the train then had to drop anchor at another platform, which necessitated about a thousand people having to change platform.

Not for me. I stayed where I was, took a later train and was able to sit down and get some work done.

It seems amazing, though, that in 2016 a network and thousands of passengers can be compromised by a single point of failure, on this occasion a single point of signal failure.

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Categories Communication, Customers

Internal Naming

September 12, 2016 //
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It never ceases to amaze me how much confusion there is, and much talking across purposes, when we haven’t agreed the basics in a project.

Especially an internal project. When it’s an internal project, we’re all taking with people inside the business so a level of understanding is assumed. All the more reason to make sure we define what we’re doing and the parts of what we’re doing, to avoid confusion, miscommunication, missed deadlines and frustration.

It’s the best way to avoid this kind of conversation:

“Where’s the rest of it?”

“What do you mean, the rest of it?”

“Well, I kinda assumed you were going to do this, this and this…”

“No, I think this and this was supposed to be all we were doing for today.”

“OK, I need to do a reset with the Chieftain, then. I don’t think we have everything s/he’s looking for.”

Sometimes it’s only when you get into the detail of a project that you uncover the misunderstanding. All the more reason to get your internal naming of parts of a project right, and define what’s involved. Otherwise you end up over-promising and under-delivering. Not good, especially when it’s an internal project.

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Categories Communication, Marketing
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