In the States, today is one of those weird pre-holiday days.
Many people aren’t working. Some are half working. For most people, their work agenda for today was set by the calendar or their boss.
Weekends are stressful for a lot of people who love their work, because the agenda gets reset, reset by family, not by an internal to-do list or a boss.
And at work, where does your list come from? Do you answer emails by date received, by urgency, by sender? Who decides that? Which blogs do you read, which tasks do you do?
It’s fascinating to watch someone who has made a shift from a big company to solo work, or the other way around. The biggest challenge, by far, is one of agenda. What do I do now? What do I do next?
What tends to get done is what’s urgent, not important–you’ve heard that before.
I think, though, that with the new tools and new leverage available to us, the decisions get even more important. Should NBC invest money in free online YouTube content or another show for the 9 pm Thursday slot? That’s an agenda question first and foremost. Should you go on another sales call or improve the materials you’ve got so the next call will go better? Back to agenda.
Because we do it every day, we tend to take it for granted. We assume our agenda is exactly the right one, and we tweak it, we don’t overhaul it.
What if, on Wednesday, you overhauled it?
July 3, 2006
What happens after someone clicks? Are they more likely to click again? What if they’ve gone far down the road, clicking three or six or ten times? Check this out.
The human mind is a strange thing.
I don’t play golf. Good thing, too. Here’s what came in the mail from the Edwin Watts catalog yesterday:
"The Rossa Titallium Anti-skid Groove System Insert (AGSI) reduces skid, promoting precise line and optimum speed control."
The thing is, when people are defending herbal astrology, anti-resonant stereo speaker pucks or angels, they are very sure they are right. And often willing to spend a lot of time and money to prove it. $78,000 record players probably do sound better… to someone who believes they will. Same with advice from A-list consulting firms or results from a particular search engine.
Is any of it science?
July 1, 2006
Erik Severin points us to Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? The essence, I think, is that entrepreneurs think big thoughts and do big things, while small business owners settle, working their way through the day to day.
The distinction I’ve always made is that an entrepreneur is trying to make money while she sleeps, and does it with someone else’s money! That she builds a business bigger than herself, that scales for a long time, that is about processes and markets. A small businessperson, on the other hand, is largely a freelancer with support, someone who understands the natural size of her business and wants to enjoy the craft of doing it every day.
The more I see both, the happier it appears that small business people are. They often make more money, take fewer risks, sleep better and build something for the ages, something they believe in and can polish and be proud of.
Growth for growth’s sake makes less sense every day.
PS please don’t read this as anti-entrepreneur! I’m one, and proud of it. I think I was boosting the small business side more than I was tearing down the entrepreneur side…
June 30, 2006
In my free ebook about blogs (Who’s There?) I write about three kinds of blogs: cat blogs, boss blogs and blogs designed to spread ideas. Shame on me, I left out a fourth kind, a kind that is growing in popularity and influence.
Remember the Rocky Horror Picture Show? Some people saw the movie 10 or a hundred times. They knew the lines by heart. And audience interaction wasn’t just welcome, it was almost required. Throwing toast at the screen was part of the deal.
I think we’re seeing the rise of the RH blog. These are blogs with a posse, a cadre of loyal readers who participate by chat, comments or in a tightly-knit circle of blogs. The goal of the blogger is to put fuel on the fire and to keep the existing audience engaged. The ideas don’t have to be new, and they don’t have to spread, but the blog is a great way to create and maintain this community of fellow travelers.
1. Ryan points us to Hello hello? XM’s Wrong Number Fiasco – Orbitcast.com. Always check the phone number and url on anything you print. Have a friend dial it, just to be sure.
2. If you have an apartment, get tenant’s insurance.
3. If you ride a bike, wear a helmet
and
4. Don’t put anything about a customer or a boss in an email or on a blog that you don’t want the world to see.
Enjoy your weekend.
Most marketers have one.
Often unconsciously, we use these marketing heroes to help us make decisions. We model our decisions after the ones we think they would make. What would Richard Branson do? What would David Ogilvy do? What would my dad do?
Because marketing is as much art as science, we have to acknowledge that there are no right answers, and that there are very different approaches to a problem.
There are two big opportunities for problems. The first is alignment. When you and your boss or your colleagues have different heroes, communication and implementation is a mess. And second is picking the wrong hero for the wrong project. You can do everything right and fail because you’re busy being Lester Wunderman but marketing perfume.
June 29, 2006
My limb savior (bad shoulders) Fred’s book is hovering in the top few hundred on Amazon. I talk about it on my back pain lens: How I beat my aching back. If this is irrelevant to you, congratulations! For the rest of us, hope it helps.
Continuing in the series:
- Selling is hard. Harder than you may ever realize. So, if I seem stressed, cut me some slack.
- Selling is personal. When I make a promise, I have to keep it. If you force me to break that promise (by changing processes, features or a rollout schedule) I will never forgive you.
- Selling is interpersonal. I am not moving bits, I’m trying to change people’s minds, one person at a time. So, no, I can’t tell you when the sale will close. No one knows, especially the prospect.
- I love selling. I particularly love selling great stuff, well marketed. Don’t let me down. Don’t ask me to sell lousy stuff.
- I’m extremely focused on the reward half of the equation. Salespeople love to keep score, and that’s how I keep score. So don’t change the rules in the middle, please.
- I have no earthly idea what really works. I don’t know if it’s lunch or that powerpoint or the Christmas card I sent last year. But you know what? You have no clue what works either. I’ll keep experimenting if you will.
- There is no comparison, NONE, between an inbound call (one that you created with marketing) and a cold call (one that you instructed me to create with a phone book.) Your job is to make it so I never need to make a cold call.
- Usually, customers lie when they turn me down. They make up reasons. But every once in a while, I actually learn something in the field. Ask!
- I know you’d like to get rid of me and just take orders on the web. But that’s always going to be the low-hanging fruit. The game-changing sales, at least for now, come from real people interacting with real people.
- (a bonus, switching points of view for a moment): I know that selling is hard and unpredictable. But if you’re going to be in sales, you’ve got to be prepared to measure and predict and plan. You need to give me sales reports and call lists and summaries. It does neither of us any good to keep your day a secret. If you don’t plan and organize, I can’t do my job of marketing.
- (and bonus number two): The two worst pieces of feedback you can give me (because neither is really actionable or especially effective): a. lower the price and b. make our product just like our competitors.
