Habits of successful artists – Spark 5 — See the world as it is

Seeing the world as it is… it seems simple, but what is the world? Being able to see what really works, what does not work (and probably even more important: what will work in the future) is a key competency of a marketeer, an entrepreneur, a CEO,… With great power comes — as always — great responsibility: Some points of attention:

Point of view

The world is about perception. And perception is all about point of view. Just ask a customer who is on the road driving his car and calling a hotline for an urgent request but is transferred towards an online channel because the flawlessly designed process of the company he calls has noted that he prefers his communication via online over communication via phone.

Even within your organisation, the point of view can switch from one business unit to another. Take this into account when you try to change the world.

Empathy

Seeing the world as it is comes with both good and bad: As the world will not be perfect, you will also notice a lot of things that don’t work. Don’t over-emphasise them & if you do: pick your battles.

Timeframe

Seeing the world as it is might give you the false impression it’s about today, where I would argue you should be able to look at the way it will/should be tomorrow. When in doubt, go for the world of tomorrow!

Action-driven

What good is it to see when you cannot change the world? Not only do your observations only bring value when they initiate a change, it also proves to be the most effective way to bring in more believers to your vision.

Habits of successful artists – Spark 4: Fail often.

Failure

Lack of success.
The neglect or omission of expected or required action.
The action or state of not functioning.

Failure is apparently no longer an option. People and organisations are becoming more afraid to fail than of not to act.

Indulge me in making a case for some kind of failing…

First: people as a species are not good in risk estimates. We tend to overestimate the probability of events that in reality only have a very low chance of occurring (some scientific reading for a change). That should already make you more at ease with falling into analysis paralysis. There is probably always one more check you can do before you actually move over to action — in order to make sure you have covered every base — but in reality, the subject of your extra effort probably will never occur in the first place.

Second: there is failing and failing. I want to make the case for quick and controlled failing.
Quick as in: don’t waste 70% of your resources on analysis, because in the end you will not only have no resources left to actually make something happen, you will also have noticed that you lost that much time that reality (the basis of your initial assumptions) has changed in the meanwhile .
Controlled as in an environment with limited impact and monitored (to enable you to learn and tweak).

Third: To really create something extra-ordinary, to go where no man (m/f) has gone before, there is no guidebook, so the change you can either calculate the outcome upfront or — just by good luck — end up with something perfect the first time, is close to 0% (which shows some interesting light on point one of course).

So set up a controllable place that enables you to fail… often!

Extra: Now is the time to start failing. The last decade is failure open for some setback (just look at the use of the word in the image below ;-)).

Habits of successful artists: Spark 3 — Speak in Public.

(Part of a series based on inspiration from Seth Godin’s ‘The Icarus Deception’).

Speaking in public. Most of us don’t like it be default. You are out in the open, vulnerable and very open to criticism.

However, you should do it for multiple reasons.

It helps you in making your idea grow.

You might be the most creative person in the organisation, a good idea can always become better (more practical, more taken into account the limitations of the real world,…), and probably others in your organisation can you help identify the parts of your idea that need some tuning.

It gives other people drive.

People just love stories, we all want to feel the vibe of being part of something good. Even the most rigid people will feel a little (invisible to the outside world off course) chill if they witness the next big thing to be.

It helps you sell your idea.

A brilliant idea is useless until it is shipped. Chances are that you need other people to help you ship (get a budget, get access to a trade channel,…)

Somehow, the art of selling trough speaking is not as present in modern business life as it should be.

Personally, this is one of the modern business skills I need to work hard on, because getting the message through is the only way forward. It strikes me even more now how some people don’t see the importance of developing this skill. Even for sales people and marketeers, who be default are ‘selling’ on a daily base, this seems to be the case.

So a warm outreach: ‘selling your idea’ is not an objective, it’s a skill!Go get them!

Habits of successful artists: Spark 2 — Say thank you in writing.

(Part of a series based on inspiration from Seth Godin’s ‘The Icarus Deception’).

The art of saying thank you is probably both the most cheap and underestimated gifts (in both professional as personal environments).

Saying thank you shows:

you took the time to truly look at the outcome (which meant both the end result was good en the task meaningful);
that the person helped you as a person (an not just did a task within the organisation);
you care enough to show your appreciation out in the open: people can keep your feedback when you write it down;
that you are willing to make it personal: write it down in your handwriting and it shows it comes from you, not from a computer with always the same font.

A thank you makes It just makes you feel good.

Mission for self: write a thank you note this week.
Mission for you: write one today!

Habits of successful artists: Spark 1 — Learn to sell what you have made.

Reading the book ‘The Icarus deception’ from Seth Godin, I came upon this list:

“The habits of successful artists”

Learn to sell what you have made.
Say thank you in writing.
Speak in public.
Fail often.
See the world as it is.
Make predictions.
Teach others.
Write daily.
Connect others.
Lead a tribe.

It stroke me with that much inspiration, that I decided to write one article on each (or try at least, no sense in sharing nonsense also). Easy peasy: in the order they appear.

First up: Learn to sell what you have made.

I couldn’t agree more. I’m the first to take blame, but being able to ship is in my opinion the key differentiating element for companies big and small. For some reason, in small companies, it seems like the natural thing to do. Probably because shipping there is the only way to generate revenue to pay for the cost you made. Off course, this is not different in large companies, but apparently, there is moment where companies come at a stage where the direct impact of not generating revenue right away is not that visible anymore. If you are big enough, there is no risk that you will not be able to pay your cost at the end of the week (off course, also this is an illusion, but perception is everything off course).

Another element might be that the (perceived) risk of doing some wrong is bigger in a big company than in a small. Putting it this way: if you are a one man company and you screw up big time, you need to find another job and you need to work during the week end to pay of some debt, if you are a company with 1000 employees and you screw up as a company, 1000 people need to find a new job and millions are lost for shareholders. And off course, most shareholders don’t like risk…

The only way out of this is to start putting a risk premium on ‘not shipping’, on ‘not doing anything’ or ‘doing as last year and hoping that the outcome will not be too much different’. In economical terms: this is not only the opportunity cost, but also the cost of loosing your first mover advantage or even the cost of becoming obsolete.

Whenever you think: I will not present these figures to my boss this week because it’s not what he wants to hear and I want to check some extra figures, force yourself to not only put into the equation your fear (Seth would call it ‘your lizard brain’), but also the cost of loosing one week time in adapting if you prove to be right…

Shipping this article now!

Also available on Medium.

The end of CRM, the start of MRM

In BtB, it’s about Market Relationschip Management

Customer Relationschip Management systems, programs & processes are the cornerstone of every modern company. Without them, it’s impossible to assure a good customer relationschip (especially in large companies, where everybody takes one part of the customer interaction): When your support people take up the phone, they want to make sure the customer instantly feels connected because your agent knows who he is, knows what products/services he has from your company, what is important for him, how happy he is, what are his outstanding invoices,…

It’s clear that there are a lot of solutions on the market (from the very large SAP / Siebel / Microsoft kind of solutions towards the smaller cloud solutions (Nutshell, Highrise,…).

When implementing these tools, the tricky part comes: We tend to implement them from a customer perspective (clearly, hence the C in CRM). However — especially in a B2B environment — the market is typically smaller and more stable. It can happen that a customer is leaving you, but comes back in 2 years, or is shifting part of his portfolio to you from a competitor because you have a new kind of product/service. If you want to do things right, we should stop building CRM processes and tools, but start working with Market Relationschip models (MRM): A customer who leaves you is the best lead you’ll ever have: you know his business, you know what is crucial for him (the thing he left you for might give a hint), you already have his contact information, you know his needs (at least partly: the products/services he ordered with you in the past),…

In data-model terms: stop seeing a prospect, a customer and a lost customer as different entities, they are merely charasteristics of the same entity. See it as a tag on a company name that you can use to differentiate your approach towards them (on your complete marketing mix).

How to you handle your CRM processes?

Also available on Medium.

Internal communication is not a business unit.

Typically, it goes like this: In small companies, internal communication is done by the owner of the company. It’s not in her job description (owner’s don’t tend to have a formal job description in the first place), she just feels the need to communicate to her company. All of a sudden, in larger companies, it becomes the role description of a dedicated person or even a whole business unit.

The people in this unit then can start the work of a miner. They constantly need to push all people in the organisation for information (Do we have a new product that we should push on the corporate website? Is there a new big client the CEO can use as a reference when talking to industry leaders? How good is the knowledge of all employees on corporate strategy?…). I can only begin to image how difficult their work must be. They are faced with a situation where every employee is their source of information on the one side (but nobody has off course the time to produce direct usable information) and the complete organisation is also their target group.

Off course, this is about knowledge and the thing about knowledge networks is that every single person has an interest in learning (getting knowledge), but not directly in sharing his own knowledge (because that off course takes time). As the value of the knowledge network is mainly defined by the individual pieces of knowledge in it and everybody seems to value the power of knowledge, we should try to push more the boundaries of the typical knowledge role of internal communication in large companies.

I would argue that ‘internal communication’ should not be the formal role of one or more people, it should be a part of the role description of every single employee. The role of internal communication should be transformed into a curating one:

enable the knowledge sharing and learning (through dead easy tools);
reward knowledge sharing;
create and archive of the most important knowledge;
create flows of knowledge exchange in all directions in the organisation.

Seems a lot more fun than bugging people for information also…

How is your internal communication team oriented?

Discuss also on Medium https://medium.com/marketing-strategy/39b0172b2fc9

The end of bad experiences?

City hopping in a Foursquare world.

NYC must be the place where you can use Foursquare-like tools the most easy. Maybe it’s because I’m only an outsider visiting the City that never sleeps, but the amount of coffee bars, places to enjoy an early afternoon cocktail or discover new tastes is enormous. When I was in NYC the first time a decade ago, finding a place was as easy as it is today, the only difference was that you had no clue upfront whether the place would be great, just good or plain rubbish. Every coffee you ordered was an opportunity for an new taste experience or a disappointment in humanity all together. Chances where about 50/50.

Today, things are different. Very different. I don’t think we had one drink/bite in a place that did not have a 8+ score on Foursquare… and preferably with an online OpenTable functionality (saves you a lot of trouble waiting for the place to actually open and a lot of money if you are on a roaming rate).

There is no more hiding in this world. Bad places can only exist for the group of people not willing or not able to check a place out before they enter. With this group growing smaller over time, all market players will need to push the limit, become more agile, more original, more customer oriented, more experimental, more cosy, more local, more specialised.

Tourist traps will only live so long. Don’t ever again say technology is not bringing good things to humankind! Don’t wait for the crowd and technology to change your industry, change it for them!

Article also on Medium.

Getting trough the silos (process evolution). A new C-level position?

When you start as an entrepreneur, life is hard, but straightforward when it comes to getting things done: you and you alone are responsible. If the product needs a new price, you do it. It you need to update the packaging, you do it. It’s always you. If things go wrong, you are responsible. If things go great, it’s you who made it happen.

The larger organisations become, the more processes, governance structures and job descriptions with clear lines between what is job of person A and what is the job of person B. At some moment in time, you arrive at a situation where processes seem to define everything. “Computer says no” becomes a reality. What really is the issue is when people start believing that there is a process for everything because this implies that having an issue, opportunity, idea,… that can not be funnelled in an existing process… cannot exist. In the mind of people fallen into the ‘a process for everything’-trap, it is virtually impossible to grasp the fact that their might be an idea that does not follow the ‘processes’. It’s a bit like telling to a medieval family that the earth is round. It’s just beyond their way of thinking. To make things even more complex, there is probably a separate silo in the organisation that even is responsible for processes. They tend to be the one that guard the processes…

It’s clear that innovation or even being able to adapt to the changing market in an organisation as this is … well … just not imaginable.

Now imagine a new C-level executive, directly reporting to the CEO. (S)he has no direct reports, no teams, just an MOO-printed business card and carte blanche to investigate each process, follow on every lead (because every employee can send Kafka-like stuff or roadblocks to the_mover@yourcompany.com) and force easier ways of working. He does not have to make a business case to change things, it’s the current process owner who is responsible for the business cases that proves that his current process is still the best).

What impact would this have on your organisation? Sounds like an interesting job to me!

Article also on Medium.

Agile for business

Working within and with a marketing team typically means working with always changing stakeholders (every project is different), a lot of young and eager people, a lot of overloaded decision makers, continuously changing market demands,… All the things that make business life lively. You have to love it, but this also means that quite some time is spend on aligning people, on planning, follow up, sharing information, status meetings,… This all seems like typical project management stuff and there is quite some research on that: what works and what doesn’t. However, in a typical project resources are committed to one scope, where’s in business reality today, you tend to be more in a web of different ‘projects’. Question there is: How to bring in the knowledge from project management without bringing in the heavy methodology and tools that might work in a large project setting, but nog in various day to day interactions?
Doing some investigations on how multidisciplinary teams can work more efficient together when not being in one great project, I learned some things.

things need to be able to shift/transfer quickly trough the organisation without loosing it’s point of origin
forget about one solution for the whole company if you are more than 100 people
extreme choice (as in: whatever solution you choose, push it hard and force yourself to put as much in it as possibel) has some advantages (don’t use multiple ways of communication).
one exception: face 2 face can (and should) always complement the communication method/tool you use.
as always, people and their belief in the process & the use of the tools define the outcome.

I am now experimenting a lot with Trello combined with some sort of weekly (and in some periods daily) kind of stand-up meeting to get all our campaigns, strategic work, projects,… done.
What works well for you and your team?