All in Sales
Donald Miller is an author and businessman who helps organizations tell better stories. His message is that, in a business world that’s full of noise and clutter, the only way to cut through is to tell stories and engage your audience - in any type of setting.
One of his key themes is that there are really 4 key roles you can play in any story - hero, villain, guide or victim.
In any pitch - whether it’s to make a sale, get a job, get a promotion, or fund an initiative - the story you tell is all-important. It has to inform, educate and (many times) entertain and inspire the audience, so that they ultimately say yes, and agree to whatever your “ask” is.
So how you craft that story is absolutely critical. From the key themes, to the overall flow/structure, to the specific messages/story points, to the facts and anecdotes that illustrate those messages, it’s essential to flesh out all of those elements.
The advent of recording technology (from the cassette tape to the VCR to the current digital formats) as well as the ability to access audio-visual entertainment on demand has allowed us to do the one thing that marketers hate:
Skip their ads.
For the most part, you don’t have to sit through a 15, 30 or 60 second ad just to get to the content you’re actually there for. You just hit the forward button and presto! No marketing message, no advertiser trying to sell you something.
There’s a difference between “personal” and “personalized”.
In an age where Marketers are working to find ways to make their messages more customized, more tailored, more specific to who we are, there’s still a marked difference between the two. Just because that email is addressed to you, or there’s a special offer made on your birthday, doesn’t actually make it personal. It’s simply programmed to appear that way.
Strategy is an interesting topic.
You and I can be working in similar areas of management. We can have gone through the same set of experiences in our time at our organization. We can even have a similar view of what defines success in our chosen markets. Yet we can have markedly different perspectives as to what approach it will take to get there. And that’s perfectly normal - in fact, it’s almost always a good thing.
In my last post, I talked about the thought process we (should) go through when deciding if it’s time to quit what we’re doing.
While there were multiple idea threads that inspired that post, one of them was an article by Mariam Naficy, the Founder and CEO of Minted, an online design marketplace. In that article, Mariam talked about how she raised a small seed round from friends and family and then launched the business, originally intending it to be a lifestyle business. And then:
In my last post, I said that the great thing about technology today is that everyone has a platform.
At the same time, the terrible thing about technology today is that everyone has a platform. The thing is just because we have access to a platform doesn’t mean we can use it. That access has got to come with some level of responsibility.
We’re in a business environment that, for the most part, is fixated on growth. One that values year over year, double and triple digit revenue increases as absolutely essential to being considered a “successful” company, to not be considered a failure.
In particular, if the organization is funded, that’s almost always a base level expectation. You aren’t being funded to simply create a going concern, you’ve been given a charter to create something transformative, huge, the next proverbial unicorn. (The more prominent the funders, the more prominent this expectation becomes.)
In my last post, I talked about how there’s always room for value when deciding to enter a market and that the key is in defining that value in a way that matters to the customer, and is profitable for you.
In this post, I’ll discuss the idea of competition and how defining who you compete with, as well as how they go to market, can and should influence your decision to play within a specific space.
Now, our initial tendency as we evaluate a specific market will be to consider the most obvious competitor in that space. This is our direct competition, and they are always the ones with the biggest brand, revenues, mindshare.
Back in my early consulting days, I was asked to give a presentation to a prospective client and was handed a deck to present. My instructions were to go through the material, get comfortable with the content and then do a run-through with the partner with whom I’d be doing the pitch.
The content was right in my sweet spot, so I was pretty comfortable with the key messages that we needed to get across. But some of the material in the deck didn’t sit well with me.
A small portion of the folks who follow me on Twitter think I’m Omar Abdullah, the former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. I know this because every so often they’ll Direct Message me with news about developments in Kashmir (usually holding me accountable for it), or they’ll post an article about some Kashmir related issue and tag me along with the Prime Minister of India and other senior South Asian politicians.
It doesn’t happen a lot but it’s happened enough that I posted a PSA in Twitter that I wasn’t him and if you were following me for my views on Kashmir, you’d be sorely disappointed.
Change doesn’t tend to come easily to most of us.
For the most part, we don’t typically choose to change. More often, change - or at the very least, the need for it - is thrust upon us due to some exterior event, shift or development. When profits are severely impacted, when a competitor introduces a revolutionary new product or when an external environmental shift occurs, shifting the steady state we’ve become so comfortable with.
It’s easy to be nice (or virtuous or kind or thoughtful) when the eyes of the world - or even a single person, for that matter - are on you. It’s much harder, and frankly, far more telling and meaningful when they’re not.
This is true in all walks of life, but especially so in the business world, where we allow ourselves to use the “capitalist filter” to make decisions that, if we were to step back and assess them in a broader social or moral sense, we likely would have acted otherwise. (Putting aside why people are so completely comfortable divorcing moral or fairness considerations from economic ones. That’s a conversation for another time.)
Sometime between late Spring and early Fall, 1996, AOL’s stock fell from a high of $70 all the way down to $24.
These were the early days of the internet. The space was booming: startups were popping up everywhere, investors’ ears were perking up, and the big, established players were taking notice and/or beginning to get involved.
…Is that there really isn’t any such thing.
In popularity contests of any significance (where a sizable population is asked for its endorsement of an individual or a subject or an action), the landslide win is not a common occurrence. More prevalent (in my admittedly unscientific assessment) is the close race, where the margin of victory is in single digit percentage points.
When it comes to the work we do, no one likes surprises.
It doesn’t matter which part of the organization you sit in - client management, operations, marketing or elsewhere - one of the fundamental tenets of corporate performance is predictability. We want to know what’s happening, why and, if necessary, what we need to do about it.
One of the staples of modern air travel is the flight safety video. It’s an aviation regulation that’s designed to ensure everyone is appropriately briefed on flight safety procedures in the event of an emergency.
If you’ve ever taken a flight, you’ve sat through one. And if, like me, you fly a lot, you’ve not only sat through them, you’ve likely tuned out during the briefing.
Think of the most exciting job you’ve done, the best initiative you’ve been part of, the most rewarding experience you’ve had. What was the underlying basis of that experience, the focus of the leadership in that situation? Were you excited? Were you focused on moving towards something? Were you inspired?
How many newsletters do you get in your inbox every day? How many emails do you get with an update on some issue or department or project? How many notifications do you get on your phone with the latest piece of “must-have” information?
Now, how many of them do you actually read?
We crave clear cut answers. We love How-To’s. We keep looking for the ultimate 10 Step Process.
Why? Because we’re always on the hunt for clarity, predictability and, more to the point, security. It’s a natural human desire.
The problem, though, is that when we’re creating (a team, a piece of output, a business), that’s not often possible or realistic.
