Why a cover letter is just waisted time (aka: The BS of a cover letter)

The official version goes that a cover letter shows your motivation and your hunger to get the job. If you do not take the time to write a cover letter, you don’t really want the job no?? A more down to earth version goes that it helps the junior HR staff to preselect the short list of potential candidates. After all, if you get 100 cv’s, you need some help in drilling down… Would be ok if you believe it’s HR who does the final decision, but in a phase of just filtering the bad ones out, all you need is a CV.

But in my opinion, it’s all BS: If a recruiter only takes time to write a half pager with some generic stuff (you know the drill: open minded, team-player, 5-10 years experience in a BtB market, project experience,…), how do you expect somebody to already want the job with all their hart?? People who say this are only interested in either the company name (“it’s the coolest brand ever”) or in the job-title (“look at my new business card”), none of them are good reasons to hire somebody.

And yes, I know, you would love to see me telling how great your company is (it probably is, otherwise the applicant would not even go through the trouble of reaching out, asking to open up the conversation), but that should not convince me to hire me either don’t you think?

Wanting a job really shows trough interaction with people, by talking to people working there, by interacting with the company twitter, by walking to the interview space in their offices.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/interview_questions

Helping people to reach their goal.

There is a lot to tell about leadership, coaching, tutoring,… and how important it is in getting more efficient, more innovative, more customer centric,… as a team or company. Off course, you should help people when their success helps you to have a success (typically always the case for your team members).

However, what most people forget is just how good it makes you feel personally when you can help people in reaching **their** goal, even if it is not linked to your objectives. It is definitely not a pure hedonistic view on it, but it’s a strong and good driver I think. And also: when the going get though, they might remember you for helping them shine!

What about you, when did you help people in reaching **their** goals.

Mobile Optimized

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Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.

Off course, you always want to be AND harder AND better AND faster AND stronger (AND more AND less costly AND more innovative…)
The real question is: if you are forced to choose, what do you do?

Do you want to go towards more customers
or do you want to be there with more products
or do you want to be the first with a new idea?

Probably, there is no right answer, as it al depends on the situation.
If you are for example a large commodity supplier in a saturated market, you want to be STRONGER. Taking more parts of the existing value chain for example. If you are in a downside market, you want to be BETTER and do the same for less. Reduce your operational costs again and again…
If you are a start-up, you want to go HARDER: taking more customers with your one product/service you are build upon.

But when in doubt, the smartest way is probably to go for FASTER. Getting towards the market faster gives you either more revenue and margin/EBIT, or it gets you to failure more quickly. Which enables you to learn, adapt en beat the competition that has not yet failed but is loosing touch points with their existing audience.

Be hard on values.

Organisations should not be soft on values in times when things are good.
In times when things go good, organisations tend to be ’to human’. Employees who are doing an ok job, but not in line with the values are easily tolerated. Just because: they can afford.
The thing is however, that when things become more heavy, and the organisation needs to perform high to survive, you see that you are not getting there with those ’tolerated’ people. The problem now is however, that just because things are hectic, you cannot afford missing anybody now.
So always make sure you have people that are performing well and in line with your values, you’ll need the best when things are going to get rough.

Focus and organisation setup.

Getting focus in a world full of distractions (personally, I would call them more positively more inspirational inputs ;-)) can get you in some kind of idea paralysis. When you get to much inputs, idea’s, projects, opportunities,… the risk is imminent to overload your system and stop actually realising things.

There is a reason why in typical team profiles, there is paid a lot of attention in getting balanced teams: you need people who generate ideas, challenge them, other people to get the stuff actually done and still others for maintaing the survice (and often forgotten: others to monitor it). The challenge today is that organisations expect more and more for individual people to be able to generate ideas, implement them, get them to customers, monitor them,…

To get to this ideal situation, let’s train people to exchange information (learn from the guy that is good in implementation and the girl that is good in follow-up) and most of all: enable (stimulate even!) them to create small working units that can get the complete development cycle done without having to worry to much about rigid organisational structures. This way you will enable a way of working where the best people for each specific project get the work done (because typically for launching an internet product to BtB customers, you need Marlies to do the implementation, where you would need René if it is about an technical service for BtC customers).

Off course, you need some kind of ‘driving’ focus. To stir up the discussion, as a marketeer, I would tend to argue that your customer segment should be the overall umbrella (and not: product range, sales channel,…). What do you think? How does your organisation works today??

Focused on Readability

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Pop-up consulting

… or make it or make it Pop-up creation.

Getting the time to focus on the important (but maybe less urgent) things is not that easy. By borrowing the pop-up concept (be it from stores to agencies), there might be a solution to all your important needs. Image that a small team of external people comes in for 2 days, develops together with your internal people one concept (be it a new product idea, a go-to-market strategy, a marketing plan, a sales campaign,…), how time and resource efficient would that be. You combine the experience of your people, the knowledge and focus external people can bring to create a real output.

I know I would love it!
JOINED!ly, we can make it happen!

Can we?

Can we…
Yes you can!
When people in your team ask you: “Can we…”
… launch this product
… use this colour instead of that one
… postpone this project
… launch this new project
… send out this customer communication.

The answer should be: off course you can, if you think it is the right thing to do.
For this to work, you need 3 things (next to capabilities to execute):
– a good culture/values (kudos to The Hubspot at http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/the-hubspot-culture-code-creating-a-company-we-love)
– access to information (make sure your people know what others are working on, what is important for the company and the customers right now
– Trust.

Strange that those 3 things seems to be the hardest for every team or company to acknowledge and to develop. Maybe we should force ourselves to book a fixed timeslot in our agent to work on culture & values, on information sharing and on trust?

Competition as part of your value chain

On selling ‘your default product’… regardless of the situation and customer needs.

True story: I work in a large office building that is shared by multiple companies. The owner of the building rents floors of the building including the services: Water, electricity, heat, working toilets, vending machines for food, coffee machines,… stuff like that. This also includes toilet paper being available at all time. Of course, this work is outsourced to a specialised company meaning that all toilet holders and the toilet paper they hold is from one firm who probably does not sell toilet paper by the roll, but sells something like: ‘99,9 % of working hours, your employees have toilet paper’.
Yesterday, something strange happened: All toilet dispensers (and also the towel, soap,… dispensers) where physically removed and replaced by others. Meaning in a lot of work (handyman coming in with drills and stuff), a lot of noise and dirt al over the place for – at the end of the day – having the same toilet paper (no, the rolls where not bigger, did not have a different colour, no fancy smell,…): plain old toilet paper.
Although I off course understand the importance of having your logo on the toilet dispensers as ‘service’ company and having easy access to the toilet paper,…, the end results is quite hilarious. No change (off course, probably at a lower cost for the building owner), no possibility of re-using the existing infrastructure and just replace… well… the toilet rolls.
Wouldn’t it be ‘innovative’ to just see your competitor as part of your supply chain? After all, it is more cost efficient for the both of you if you could ‘exchange’ the physical toilet dispensers if you trade a customer. Not to mention how much better it would be for the environment (less garbage, I’m not quite convinced that the old provider will come and pick up his old dispensers) and the customer (quicker transition period).