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What Do You Need More Of In Order To Succeed?
filed in Storytelling, Success
If you had to pick one thing you need more of in order to succeed what would that be? Do you really need more time or more resources? Will more attention or more influence enable you to get to where you want to go?
When we dig deeper what we find we’re lacking isn’t cash or connections, it’s the courage and commitment to finish what we started. The story we tell ourselves and the lines we draw are a choice. What are you choosing to believe and act on today?
Image by Thomas Hawk
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Attention Deficit
Worldwide ad spending for 2017 is expected to reach $583.91 billion. That’s an increase of 7.3% on last year. We spend extraordinary sums of money and disproportionate amounts of time trying to get people to notice us—often without being specific about the end we have in mind.
No business ever died from a shortage of attention. Companies and ideas fail because of a lack of resonance with the people they seek to serve.
Questions for you
How much attention is enough to sustain your business?
Are the time and money you invest in creating brand awareness converting to results?
What resources are you devoting to creation and connection that will help you to resonate?
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Three Ways To Sell
If you want to get more comfortable about selling, it’s helpful to consider which of these three sales techniques you use and to assess how they’re working for you.
Describing
This is the most common way to sell—one you’ve likely experienced or used. Describing the specifications, features and benefits of our products and services is usually our default sales technique. We tell people what they get, how it works, what it does and how much it will cost.
Storytelling
There’s no doubt that customer success stories are a powerful way to explain the benefits of our offerings. Before and after case studies and testimonials help people to imagine what their future might look like or who they might become in the presence of our product.
Listening
By far the most overlooked and underutilised sales technique is to listen before pitching. It’s far easier to make something people want than it is to make people want something. We can only do this by understanding the stories, frustrations, challenges and goals of our prospective customers.
Empathy is underrated.
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The Art Of Customer Loyalty
How many store loyalty cards do you have in your wallet? How many more will you be offered this week? Do you still carry a wallet?
We’ve tried to turn customer loyalty into a data-driven science. A game of, if we do this, customers will do that. In our desire for something to measure, or a needle to move, we’ve lost sight of one crucial point. Our customers’ reactions and responses can’t always be conditioned in predictable ways. Loyalty is not transactional, it’s built on something we can’t measure—on how the customer feels.
Instead of creating our entire marketing strategy around what we want the customer to do, we could consider how we want the customer to feel. Science gives us data-driven loyalty programs and homogeneous points cards that people forget they signed up for. Art allows us to be remembered for our humanity and make meaning part of our marketing.
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The Work And Reward
The customer is not there when the flowers he ordered to be delivered on a special birthday are sent too early without his handwritten greeting—which is still paperclipped to the order book. The florist gets on with processing the rush of early morning deliveries. It’s one of those days when she’s just too busy to care about every little detail. What the customer doesn’t know won’t hurt him.
The owner is not at the Italian restaurant on Bourke Street at 6 am when the window cleaner is training his new employee in the art of washing windows. He stands back, arms folded, observing—pointing out a smudge in the top right-hand corner of the big pane of glass. The trainee rubs it away—all the while learning about the standard he must uphold when no one is watching.
It’s a privilege to witness someone taking this much pride in what he does—work that many people might regard as menial or meaningless. It’s as if the work itself is the window cleaner’s reward. This is how we behave on our best days. We don’t make the distinction between what’s seen and unseen. We forget to make the connection between the work and some future payoff—money, attention or accolades. We simply do the best work we can for its own sake—rendering the work, ourselves and the world the better for it.
Image by Davide Gabino
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The Opportunity In Shifting Expectations
filed in Strategy
Your customers are changing. You are changing too. Notice how impatient we get now if we are second or third in a queue. In our world of one-click-ordering, instant downloads and movie streaming, we believe waiting is unacceptable. ‘Why can’t they just open more checkouts?!’
While it’s true that you can’t please all of the people all of the time, it’s important to have a strategy for managing expectations as your relationship with your customers develops over time. It’s easy to become complacent and fall into the trap of thinking what worked yesterday will work tomorrow. But as our customers evolve, we must too.
It’s never been more important to regularly question what’s changed and what needs to change.
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Welcome To The Meaning Economy
filed in Strategy
In the 1950s and 60s when my parents were entering the workforce they created value by working with their hands in an Industrial Economy. Workers manufactured and moved things that would be consumed. In the era of the Information Economy, we began using our heads to produce value. We learned to use computers to design, code and connect. Today we’re seeing a powerful shift towards the building of the Meaning Economy where the brands and businesses that thrive are the ones that enable us to work with our hearts as well as our head and hands.
Unlike my parents who worked to put food on the table, we now want to feel proud of the work we do and the companies where we work. It’s no longer enough to make money without meaning.
The Meaning Economy has also created a new kind of customer who is drawn to brands that share and enable him to express his values. We know how we spend our money and what we choose to get behind is a vote for the future we want to see. We support businesses that are generous and mindful of the impact they make.
We’re formulating a new value equation—one that rewards work that is carried out with heart and businesses that are driven by purpose before profits. Are you ready for The Meaning Economy?
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What Would The Enlightened Marketer Do?
When the email subject line contains the words ‘urgent alert’ there’s no doubt about the sender’s intention. His metric for success is the number of people who open the email today—the more the better.
Instead of baiting people with messages to make them act, the enlightened marketer thinks about how his words will make customers feel. He understands things like open rates that he can easily measure, only tell part of the story.
The enlightened marketer doesn’t jeopardise his long-term strategy for a quick near-term gain. He behaves like his objective is to get to do it all again tomorrow.
Is what you’re about to do today serving your goals for tomorrow?
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How Could We Have Done Better?
Whether things go right or wrong, we instinctively understand there’s always room for improvement. And yet, remarkably, we rarely stop to ask ourselves exactly how we could have done better. Instead, we beat ourselves up about our failures—playing the disappointment over and over in our head. Or we self-congratulate without taking the chance to build on our success.
Success and failure are opportunities for growth in equal measure. We should make the most of them. Decide what one thing you could you have done better, then go ahead and do it the next time.
Image by Hamza Butt
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Anticipating The Next Move
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
Every successful business strategy is dependent upon making a good decision about the next move. In a commercial world, we spend a lot of time planning to create growth. Often those plans rely on getting the customer to do what we want them to do—so we can make our next move.
The businesses that not only survive but thrive are the ones that anticipate and obsess about the customer’s next move. They intentionally design products and services that take the customer where she wants to go. The brands we are devoted to now—Netflix, Airbnb, Amazon and on and on are masters of seeing us and planning for our next move.
When our future is dependent on our customers, it’s their likely next move that should inform our strategy.
Image by George Pachantouris