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Articles filed in: Strategy
The Real Job Of The Genius
On a recent trip to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store I discovered the real job of the Genius.
While you might think that the role of the Genius is to fix things, it’s not.
The first job of the Genius is to acknowledge your problem and to change how you feel.
Chad told me that he can tell how the appointment will go in the first few seconds. He said appointments go badly when the customer believes that he won’t be able to help them. Apparently Apple Geniuses get twice as much training in changing how the customer feels as they do in solving tech problems. I lost count of the number of times I overheard a blue-shirted Genius saying “don’t worry I am going to….” that day.
The only thing that the Genius has to do is make people walk out feeling better than when they walked in. And when waiters, doctors, librarians, leaders of all stripes and you do this every day it’s a kind of genius too.
Image by Steve McFarland.
What’s Wrong With Business Communication And How To Fix It
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Strategy
Business has got a problem. It’s pervasive, eats away at human connection and strips meaning from our interactions. While trying to be professional and sound more knowledgeable we’re sanitising and jargonising our conversations. This is killing our ability to communicate.
So how do we transition from meaningless communication to creating meaningful impact?
If you ever find yourself typing a word you wouldn’t use when you’re talking to your mum.
Delete it.
When you hear words that would make your kids stare at you incredulously falling from your lips.
Stop using them.
If you start saying “apologies” instead of just being “sorry”.
Think hard about the person at the other end of that conversation.
When your words make you sound like you don’t really mean what they are saying.
Then don’t say them.
Your customers want to communicate with the real you. Your colleagues want to truly understand who you are.
Why not let them?
Image credit.
10 Things That Work Better Than SEO In The Connection Economy
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Strategy
A decade ago if you owned the URL wineseller.com and stuffed your website full of keywords you’d won. You can’t earn loyalty in a category today simply by gaming Google because your customers are searching for relevance not just keywords.
Ten things to think about beyond SEO.
1. Build a brand not just a business.
Attach meaning to everything you do. Think beyond the utility of the products and services you sell. Apple did this with “1000 songs in your pocket,” when others were selling 32MGB music players.
2. Make things that people love.
Bahen & Co. chocolate, Chobani Yogurt and Airbnb.
3. Create valuable content that people want to share.
Educate, inform and entertain with blog posts, articles, digital magazines, images and video. Problogger, TED.com and 99u.
4. Connect people to each other.
When like minded people find you, create opportunities for them to belong and to come together.
Chris Guillebeau’s World Domination Summit nails it.
5. Be generous.
Give something away.
The Holstee Manifesto has been shared and linked to tens of thousands of times. Mailchimp gives away a great library of free email marketing resources.
6. Get permission to have the next interaction.
Daily Candy, Philippa Stanton and your newsletter list.
7. Practice patience. Play the long game by building loyalty.
Logo Design Love, Etsy and Zappos.
8. Spend more time serving your audience and less time working out how to get search engine spiders to notice you.
By The Way Bakery, TED.com and The Good Life Project.
9. Earn trust, don’t just own keywords. Change how people feel not what they search for.
Wieden & Kennedy, Brain Pickings and IDEO.
10. Be the brand people seek out, not the one they stumble upon.
Tattly, Seth Godin, Evernote and Moleskine.
The brands that win now make their customer’s lives better first and worry about search rankings later. They work hard to get their message believed not just to be noticed.
Image by Zetalab.
Using What You Don’t Do To Tell The Story Of What You Do Well
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
So a customer walks into an artisan bakery and says…
“Hey your bread looks great and smells divine, but do you know how hard it is to make a sandwich for my kid’s lunch using those unevenly shaped unsliced loaves? Why don’t you make them in square loaf pans like everyone else?”
But since you bake free formed loaves (no pan required), that take up to three days to make from start to finish you understand the virtues of the unsliced loaf. And you make a stand. You choose to tell the story to the people who want to hear it. You decide to make the best loaves, not the squarest loaves.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a butcher, baker or candlestick maker, what you won’t compromise on and what you don’t do could just be your most priceless asset.
It’s your story and only you can decide how to tell it.
Image by Andrea Kirkby.
The Cycle Of Persuasion Vs The Cycle Of Loyalty
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Strategy
Shout.
Your agenda.
Short term gain.
50% off. Buy now pay later.
Big funnel gathering the most prospects.
Or….
Talk in whispers.
Your customer’s agenda.
Building trust over time.
Products and services people can’t help talking about.
“A few people loving you up close and about those people being enough.”—Amanda Palmer
Image by bwaters23.
Sales Is…..
sales
noun
1. The exchange of a commodity for money; the action of selling something.
2. A quantity or amount sold.
Actually sales is understanding how your customer wants to feel, not what she wants to buy and doing everything you can to get her there.
Image by Ed Yourdon.
Winning In The Story Economy
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Back to my hair salon.
Sally shows up on time. She gets through two colours and three trims buy lunch, then waits impatiently for the hands on the clock to turn the next four hours until closing.
Carmel makes five minutes to chat to the pensioner who took two buses to get there. She remembers that the awkward teen just started university and forgets to take a break. The clients who ask for her by name are happy to sit and wait until she’s free. The day is gone before she realises it.
The story we tell both as people and in our work is our impact. You might think it’s impossible to make this scale in a big organisation. And yet story is how Airbnb has grown a hugely successful business with a presence in more than 33,000 cities and 192 countries around the world.
The truth is that story scales and in an increasingly connected world business is built on interactions and not transactions.
Image by Ed Yourdon.
Credentials And The Fraud Police
filed in Entrepreneurship, Strategy
If I had a dollar for every person I know who is making a difference doing something they care about yet feels insecure about their right to be doing it, I would be funding a very nice round the world trip.
There’s the interior decorator who longed to be a stylist but doubted that she could pull it off. She was doing the work anyway without realising or charging for it when she consulted her clients about colours paint effects. That’s all changed now and she has even launched her own lifestyle magazine.
Then there’s the tech guy turned baker who began his business with an obsession and an email list of friends who waited with bated breath for his loaves once a week. He taught himself everything he knows. In the end he left his job and opened a bakery where he pours a whole lot of love into his recipes and the service he gives his customers.
I could tell you stories about successful authors who published because they could, not because they were anointed with a book deal. About the film editors without diplomas, the consultants with no MBA and the movement makers without permission.
Every one of us will question our right to be doing that thing that matters. Second guessing ourselves is part of the human condition. I love how Neil Gaiman described this phenomenon in his commencement address using his wife Amanda’s expression “the fraud police”. We’re going to worry about not being good enough, or being found out, or not having the piece of paper and the proof.
Here’s the only thing you need to remember. Legacies are not built on credentials.
Your work is your proof. The difference you make in peoples’ lives is your proof. The smiles on faces and the brighter start to someones day. They are your proof.
That’s all the proof you need.
Image by Remon.
Tina Roth Eisenberg On Trusting Your Gut And Following Your Passion
filed in Entrepreneurship, Strategy
Have you ever had an idea you thought might work that still hasn’t seen the light of day?
If you’ve longed to bring something you’re passionate about to life it might be time to watch the video chat I had with Tina Roth Eisenberg.
Tina is a Swiss designer based in New York who runs the hugely popular design blog Swiss Miss. She also happens to be the founder of Tattly, the best temporary tattoo company in the world and the gorgeous to-do app TeuxDeux. Tina is the brains behind Creative Mornings, which has been labelled “TED for the rest of us”. It’s become a movement with chapters running events in cities all over the world.
This lady knows how to take an idea, run with it, make it work and bring people along for the ride. Enjoy the nuggets she has to share.
Image by Bekka Palmer.
The Death Of Retail. The Symptom Is Not The Problem
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Georgina owns and operates a speciality gluten free food store in Brisbane and like many retailers she’s experiencing a problem. Increasingly people are coming to browse but not to buy. The perception is that if I can get it cheaper or faster online why would I make the trip to your store?
So Georgina has resorted to charging customers a $5 fee to look because she’s tired of people just coming in for advice and then leaving to buy from supermarkets or online stores. I feel her pain and her desperation but I doubt that this will solve her problem.
The reason bricks and mortar stores are closing left and right has everything to do with the perception of price over value. Customers are no longer willing to drive across town to your store, find a parking spot and browse your shelves in the hope that you have the very thing they wanted in stock. They are not going to make a trip just to complete a transaction because they don’t have to.
The value of bricks and mortar stores was that they were the only places to get the thing you wanted. When you can get that thing in two clicks of a mouse where does the value lie?
It lies in the potential of the interaction. The way you make customers feel. In being generous. In finding ways to give people more than you put in their shopping bag. So much more that it’s worth the effort to come back, not for the gluten free flour or a paperback but for the connection with you and the story they can tell themselves.
The retail stores that are dying are trying to sell something (anything!) to everyone instead of finding the people they can delight. The people who aren’t just looking for a bargain. The ones who want something to believe in and who will cross town to pay more if they have to because you touched them.
The businesses that survive won’t have more shelf space and cheaper prices, or even rules to discourage customers from coming in to engage. They are the ones who can work out a way to capitalise on the things the big guys can’t and won’t do.
What’s killing retail isn’t the world wide web, it’s that retailers forgot about creating meaning while they sold commodities. The solution is not to punish people for having a choice. It’s to be the better choice.
Image by thisisbossi.