You could argue that the subject of this post could be a motto for life, not just for business writing. After all, it’s better to effect things than be affected by them. It gives you more control over your destiny, more flexibility in your choices.
In business writing, it’s also better to be active than passive, especially if you are writing ‘persuasive’ documents like business cases or sales proposals. As an example, look at the previous paragraph. The active ‘voice’ is more powerful at effecting something, whereas the passive voice governs being affected by something.
Try and avoid phrases like ‘the ROI calculation can be found below.’ It sounds stuffy and conservative, but also weak and, well, passive. You’re writing this document, you’re in charge of it, so take control. Better to say ‘The ROI calculation below shows the value of our service to your business.’
The active voice is to do with action, and when it comes to your business writing, it’s action you want your reader to take, otherwise why take the time to write at all?
When you’re interviewing for a new job, there is in my view one type of question you should parry. That question is anything to do with being in the role you’re interviewing for.
The question is sometimes phrased along the lines of:
‘Can you describe what your typical day might be if you took this job?’ or
‘What would your priorities be coming into this role?’
You might be tempted to blurt out ‘how the heck do I know? I don’t work here, I don’t know the company, the people, the products, services, challenges, objectives or anything else well enough to answer that. I need to assess the situation first before I decide anything. Alternatively, I can share with you some vacuous generalities if you like…’ Assuming you want to work here, I don’t recommend quite such a confrontational approach to what is an unfair question.
Rather than attempting to answer the 64-thousand-dollar question, it’s much better to parry it with ‘It depends‘ and illustrate the approach you would take to learning the role so that you’d be best placed to answer the question with the knowledge, experience and authority of having lived it for a couple of weeks. After all, that’s what you did in previous roles and look how well they turned out, right?
You did your prep, you were well presented, you answered all the questions. Congrats, you nailed the interview! That’s great, it’s a hard thing to do. You should be delighted, even if you don’t end up getting the offer.
Either you will get the offer, or you won’t. If the offer doesn’t come your way, that’s the way the cookie crumbles. You did your best, you couldn’t have done more. Here are the four reasons you didn’t get the job.
1) It was already someone else’s. The company was going through the motions or through the necessary compliance process of looking at a couple of other candidates. In fairness, you could have tried to find this out during the interview. There’s nothing cheeky in asking about the other candidates so that you can sell against them.
2) Someone else better than you got the job. Don’t beat yourself up, you did your best and it took a truly exceptional candidate to edge you out. As the Desiderata says, there’s no point comparing yourself to others. There will always better and lesser folk than you. The important thing is that you did your best.
3) You wouldn’t fit in. This is a blessing in disguise and the company is doing you a favour. If the cultural fit wasn’t right for you, you would have been miserable in the job.
4) There was no job. The company was having a look around, or decided not to appoint a candidate. These are the worst types of companies. They’re true time-wasters and your time is valuable so you’re better off where you are.
Interviews are tricky things to negotiate sometimes. They’re quite unnatural exercises, with both parties on close to their best behaviour, and probably not the behaviour or personality they’re going to display when the person has started with the company.
When you boil it down though, there are three things common to an open interview and two of them you can control directly. The other you can’t. Here they are.
1) Can this person do the job? You need to have examples of how you can do the job and be able to demonstrate how what you’ve done in previous jobs will equip you well to do this one.
2) Does this person want the job? Are you genuinely motivated to secure this opportunity, or it is really interview practice for you, you’re shopping around, you’re benchmarking yourself with a view to applying leverage in your current role, it’s your second choice if your first choice doesn’t come off, and so on? You need to demonstrate you’ve done your homework on the company and are genuinely interested in where it’s going.
3) Will this person fit in to our company? This is the most important question, and one you can’t do anything about, unless you’re lying to the company and by extension to yourself. The cultural fit has to be right, or else you won’t enjoy working there, and since you’re going to be doing it 5 days out of every 7, give or take the odd holiday, what’s the point of working somewhere if you don’t enjoy it? If you know people or are connected to people in the company, ask them what it’s like working there. If you don’t know anyone, ask your interviewer what the culture is like. If they waffle, or they give you an answer that you feel is disingenuous, that’s not a good sign.
When you join a new company, that company has all the power for the first 12 months of your stay there. So remember that you’re interviewing them as much as they’re interviewing you. You may really need that job, but to stay in it, make sure you score 3 out of 3 on these interview rules.
A while back, we were doing the rounds of secondary schools with our first born to see where he’d like to pursue the most important decade of his life, educationally speaking. We’re lucky in that we live in a small town but we have 3 secondary schools to choose from, each of them different in their own way.
I asked each one of the about the provision of keyboarding – or typing as it was known to me when I was in secondary school, and back then it was only girls that were allowed to do it… – lessons for kids. Guess how many of them provide such lessons?
None.
I was astounded. I have grown up as the generation who were already passing through or past secondary school when computers came in. We made it up as we went along and after 3 decades of muddling through I can do about 30 words a minute using about half of my available digits. I cross hands and lose millions of split-seconds a year in productivity and effectiveness. I neither have the time nor the inclination to learn to type properly. It would be like a ‘righty’ stopping all work for 3 months and learning to play golf left-handed.
For kids who are 12-18 in today’s era, keyboarding skills are crucial, vital even to productive education and careers. Sure, you can learn online with software and commitment, but these skills are best taught by disciplined, patient teachers. Sure, the qwerty keyboard might be replaced by something revolutionary and probably ‘swipey’ at some point, but right now, it’s what we have and I want my kids being taught a key life-skill at school.
It’s madness I tell you, madness…
There is a term in sales remuneration called OTE. It’s a three-letter acronym – aka TLA 🙂 – naturally. OTE stands for On Target Earnings or On Track Earnings, though I prefer Opportunity to Earn myself. In sales jobs you can have a base salary element and a commission element that together give you your OTE if you hit your sales quota.
In a previous post I talked about the importance of having a product/market fit. Once you have that, then you need to scale your business so that you can capitalise on your potential. Your ‘opportunity to earn’, therefore, is to be found quite literally in the word ‘promote.’ To attract the right customers in the right numbers, you need to effectively promote your business.
If you’re a business owner/manager with a successful product, you want to take your business to the next level and you think the key is something to do with this marketing lark, here are some things to think about.
– Do you know your market? Can you profile it, describe it, and define it, tightly?
– What slices or segments make up your market? Remember that you can slice the market ‘pie’ according to things like region, industry, size etc, but also according to what is important or needed by customers. How you segment your market is crucial.
– Which segments of the market do you want to sell to? Even though you want to grow, you can’t be all things to all people. Well, you can, but not for long.
– What are these buyers like? What are the buyer ‘personas’? How do they prefer to buy?
– How will you position yourself to these segments? Positioning is the third leg of the segment-target-position stool on which will sit much of your go to market plan. By ‘position’ I mean your messaging, or how you describe your value to customers.
– Does your brand truly reflect where you’re going, not where you are or where you’ve been?
If any of this is alien to you, invest in someone to help you figure it out. It’s the key to unlocking the OTE at the end of promote.
The one thing you need for a successful business is this (no drum roll necessary) …
Product/Market Fit.
You’d be surprised – actually you might not be surprised at all – how many product-based companies don’t have it, or can’t get it.
Product/Market Fit is this, put simply: people want your stuff. A lot of people. In fact, they don’t simply want your stuff, they need your stuff, and a good number of them would be up the creek without a paddle if you took it away from them.
You need Product/Market Fit for your business to grow, and people won’t invest in your business unless you can demonstrate you have it. Conversely, if you’re looking to join a successful company, and this is perhaps the most obvious thing you’ll read this month, join the one that you’re sure is shifting product.
If there’s no market for what you sell, or plan to sell, there’s no business for you. Too many companies find this out too late, usually after they’ve built their product. “Now, who can I sell this to?” In other words, do the marketing first, not afterwards.
The first law of retail in the pre-Internet era – so it’s still valid for over two-thirds of global retail trade – is location, location, location.
The first law of communication, leadership and business relationships, is, to this writer’s mind, consistency. If you are consistent in your dealings with people, then it’s easier for them to be aligned with you in terms of expectations. They know what they’re getting from you and this helps them save time and money in the long run. Your consistency makes them more productive.
If you’re inconsistent, they don’t know where they stand, they can’t plan properly and they can’t make progress smoothly. No-one finds the maverick or the loose cannon that easy to work with when there’s so much at stake.
You should be predictable and constant for all the right reasons with the people that are important to you. They will appreciate you for it and come back for more.
Paul Dilger's blog 