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The Me in Engagement

January 4, 2016 //
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You hear the word ‘engagement’ all the time in business. ‘How will we engage on this deal?’ ‘We’ve got to get the customer engagement right,’ and so on.

It’s an unhelpful word to my mind. It’s not a customer-centric or friendly word. It’s all about ‘me’.

There’s a ‘me’ in engagement and it’s my view that the word makes us think on our terms and not on our customers’ terms. I don’t feel like I have the problem correctly framed nor the priorities right when I’m using the word engagement.

We engage our enemies in battle, because it’s about us and we want to win. We don’t engage (with) our customers, we want them to win.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Demotion of Emotion

December 30, 2015 //
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When you’re in a discussion about something, and in descends into an argument, it inevitably becomes emotional. This is especially true and unhelpful in business.

In these situations you tend to get a lot of ‘heat’ and not much ‘light’. In other words, there’s too much emotion and not enough inspiration.

I have a short temper and I find it’s easy for me to let a discussion descend into something unhealthy. There should be no room for emotion when you’re trying to fix or improve something, yet we find it very hard not to give it a seat at the table.

I find it much easier to do in business, but you have to demote emotion and recognise it for what it is, an instinctive response to change, stress, and a loss of control. The better you can remove emotion from the equation, the easier it is to get the right answer, to get the sums to add up.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Sales, Strategy

Hindsight Schmindsight

November 30, 2015 //
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Hindsight is a wonderful thing, or so they say. What seemed so unfathomable before it happened is the blindingly obvious conclusion now that it’s happened. And don’t we just love it when people say ‘well I could have told you that would happen.’?

Here’s my take on this. When we look at what happened with the benefit of hindsight, we see a linear connection of causal events. It’s a straight line going backwards.

When we’re faced with what’s about to happen, it’s not linear. It’s multi-linear. It can go a number of ways, and it’s unclear which way will turn out best for us. Maybe all of them will, maybe some, maybe even none. The multiplicity of choices we face with every passing second is the constant. We’re lucky we have the freedom and the intelligence to make them.

We’ll always have hindsight, and sometimes we feel like we have insight and even a bit of foresight. But you can’t turn time back and give it another go. With every fresh project you have to keep moving forward. Consider the information, make your best decision, and go.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Warts and All

November 25, 2015 //
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No company is perfect. When you work for an organisation you know about – or tend to hear about – its issues, problems, flaws and so on. You know what it’s really like under the hood.

All organisations are plagued with a lack of resources necessary to do a perfect job, which is why the perfect job doesn’t exist. The more resources you hire, the more you need.

It’s easy for us to get consumed by the things that our product doesn’t do well, or at all. We know the full story in most cases. It’s us who have to deal with the internal horror shows, and patch things up behind the scenes.

I used to know a lady whose husband worked for an aircraft manufacturers. He wouldn’t fly on the planes his team had built. He had seen the compromises, the short cuts they had made.

It’s our perspective on the warts and all, after all, because we have to work on the warts. We don’t see the full picture. We don’t appreciate the checks and balances being performed in other parts of the business.

Our customers certainly don’t see the warts, until they buy and start to use the product. And even then they might not see them, because they may only use part of the product. No product is perfect, but if your product does all the key things well, then that’s what makes your product successful.

You see, warts and all ain’t so bad. Only from your perspective.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Too Much Safety is Bad for You

November 23, 2015 //
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I’m all for proceeding cautiously, in business or in life. Some of us are more circumspect than others. It’s question of degree.

Too much caution, however, too much safety is bad for you, and can kill you. You can only take so many precautions, otherwise you’re wracked by indecision, the opportunity is gone, and you’re too late.

How many times have our children – or we see children – spend an afternoon plucking up the courage to do something like dive or jump off something high, only to lose their bottle and spend the journey home lamenting the fact that they didn’t do it.

I was reminded of too much safety in a rather humorous way the other day. I arrived at the local pool to pick up my daughter and her friend from swimming and there was a young boy having the time of his life. He had found the pool’s stash of arm bands and had put 3 on each arm and 4 on each leg. He was a mini orange Michelin Man.

As as the pool attendant saw him waddling around on the pool side, however, she told him sternly that no arm bands were allowed on the legs, it was dangerous. I guess if you had them on your legs and not your arms they might tip you up, but the irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me.

Too much safety young man! A lesson for all of us, for all our lives.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Delegating to Busy People

November 11, 2015 //
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In the olden days, by which I mean in the last century when I was learning my managerial trade, the received wisdom amongst managers was that if you wanted to get something done, you gave it to the person who was the busiest.

The theory goes, I suppose, that the person with more on their plate who is better at getting things done will have more chance of completing the additional task. This assumes, of course, that busy is directly proportional to productive. It also sends a signal to the less able or less committed member of staff that by appearing to be doing less they will continue to see other people’s workload increase to a greater extent than theirs.

It is a short-term approach that has the medium-to-long term effect of alienating and burning out the very people who you want to keep in the business if at all possible. It also does not address the problem of the less able or less committed, who are clearly in need of more training, coaching, and dialogue to help them improve.

As someone who prides himself on getting things done, on executing a high volume of important projects, I can see both sides to the argument. But, as I argued earlier, it is a question of time, that most precious of commodities. Short-term gain, at the expense of long term benefit, is simply a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s not sustainable. It’s not good management either.

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Categories General, Marketing, Planning, Sales

In Praise of Arthur Ashe

November 6, 2015 //
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The late, great Arthur Ashe was by all accounts a legend, having overcome a heap of disadvantages to reach the peak of global tennis, only to succumb a couple of decades later to a demise as a result of the cruellest luck.

He is still a role model for many people, and as a native of Richmond, VA in the USA, where I spent a few great months in 2001, he is for me an important figurehead.

He is famous for many things, not least of which are a few quotations which I think apply to work as well as they do to sport. Here are two of my favourites:

“You are never really playing an opponent. You are playing yourself, and when you reach your limits, that is real joy.”

This for me is especially true in the cut and thrust of competitive business. If we can do the best we can for our company, and not worry too much about what the competition are doing, then we can do no more. This, of course, is linked to how well we execute.

“The ideal attitude is to be physically loose and mentally tight.”

Have there ever been better words of advice for how to conduct yourself in an organisation?

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

All or Nothing

November 2, 2015 //
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If you’re going to do something, you have to give it 100% or your investment won’t get the benefit you hope for.

Sport is a good example of this in many ways. If you’re going to tackle someone, commit to the tackle otherwise you’ll end up not committing and getting yourself hurt.

Compromising, hedging your bets, trying it and seeing what happens. These are really ways of avoiding a decision. They are succumbing to the fear, uncertainty and dread, rather than making the effort, doing the homework and studying the research. And then committing.

I was reminded of this recently while on holiday. There was a ‘bouncy island’ as a guest attraction in the hotel pool. Think of a bouncy castle, but with bouncy palm trees and bouncy treasure chests. The kids and some of the parents were getting stuck in, pushing each other off the island into the pool and generally having great fun. I was happy to read and enjoy it as a spectator sport.

Finally, after about 2 hours of being encouraged to join in, I gave it a try. After about 60 seconds of being Mr Nice Guy, a child – with sharp nails, it transpired – got pushed into me in the kerfuffle and scratched off the top of my nose.

My own fault. I was patched up and got stuck in after that. It was great fun.

One footnote to add: there’s always an exception to every blog post rule. One of the dads decided it would be great fun to dive off the top of the slide at the end of the island, rather than sliding down the slide – which is why, he now realises, it’s called a slide – and cracked his head open on the floor of the shallower-than-thought pool. Off to hospital he went for 5 stitches, but it could have been a lot worse.

The commitment was there, but not the planning.

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Categories Communication, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

The Key Sales and Marketing Word for 2016

September 21, 2015 //
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Want to know what the most important word will be for sales and marketing professionals in 2016?

Engagement.

Well, it’s out there now.

I used to think the key word was ‘resonate’, but that doesn’t go far enough. When what you say resonates with someone, it’s like they’re a string you’ve plucked. You’re on their frequency, to mix a simile and a metaphor. But the string doesn’t vibrate for ever, it fades away, or loses interest and it becomes immovable, in both senses of the word.

No, to succeed we all need to engage our audience. If we work in sales, we have to get our customers engaged so that they will do something with us. If we work in marketing or sales enablement, we also have to engage our sales people, those internal customers who never read an email we send them, or a document we prepare for them. We have to find ways of making them listen and realise that this is what they need, what they have been asking for, what is going to make them more money because they can satisfy more of their customers and prospects.

Sales engagement – and partner engagement for that matter – is a crucially important slice of the pie, but it’s often the slice that gets left to go cold. And no-one likes cold pizza, at least not like they do sizzling warm pizza that engages the senses.

So if engagement is the key word in 2016, what is the key process for us for the rest of this year?

It’s this: the journey to establish and effectively communicate what we have – or what we will need to have – that will truly engage our customer.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

The Single Point of Failure

September 14, 2015 //
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We had a power failure the other day, across parts of where I live in the west of Ireland, perhaps affecting – I’m wildly guessing here – 50 to 60,000 people.

In the old days, an electricity power cut as we called it would be a major inconvenience, since all your appliances would be out, and your lights too, which, if it were winter, would mean cold houses and candles.

These days, especially during the working day, a power cut is a disaster. No electricity means – you’ve guessed it – no Internet. In a place with poor mobile signal, it also means you’re effectively off the grid. I couldn’t even vent my frustration adequately on Twitter, since I was reliant on my signal booster box – powered by electricity – to use my mobile phone.

All of which reminded me of how vulnerable we still are to the single point of failure that is our infrastructure and its systems. When a major travel accident results in thousands of travellers being inconvenienced, who compensates them for that? Similarly, when the power goes, who compensates thousands of paying consumers for the loss of productivity, or the loss of money invested in frozen food which thaws during a prolonged outage?

In the Cold War in the UK, we used to say that the Russians would wait for 2 inches of snow before they invaded; the country would be at a standstill. Our traffic infrastructure was – and still is to a degree – our single point of failure.

It still feels like that these days when the rubber bands and string of our major power infrastructures fail.

All of which leads me onto parallels with work. None of us in my opinion should be a single point of failure at work.

I’ve heard it said that you should try to make yourself indispensable, but that leads some people to become islands of information and jealously protect processes that only they know. I used to work with one such guy in a marketing agency and he was called the Mac Mason. My view is that the best staff are the ones who strive to make themselves dispensable, through leadership and innovation. And if your employers are dumb enough or political enough to make this a reason to get rid of you, then you’re better off out of there, they don’t deserve you.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales, Technology
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