Author: Fabrizio

The two parts of action

Fabrizio2 Comments

There are two parts in action.

  1. Knowing what needs to be done.
  2. Doing it.

The first part has to do with learning, and arguably nowadays we are in the perfect context to get to know what needs to be done. Information has never been more available, there is a “five-step” list to get to do almost everything one can think of, education and peer-to-peer sharing of experiences is facilitated like never before.

The second part, on the other hand, has never been so difficult. It is where 99.9% of us fail.

Investing and the stock market is the perfect example for this. There’s a beautiful lesson by Howard Marks, co-founder of Oaktree Capital, in one of the latest Motley Fool Money podcast (interview starts around 18:50). To summarise it:

Stocks return 9-10% a year on average. We know that. Yet they rarely return between 8 and 12% in any single year. The average is not the norm. Why is that? It’s because of emotional excesses. To the upsides, that then require corrections, and to the downsides. If you think about the value of a company in a 60-year time frame, that is not impacted by what happens day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year. It is pretty stable. The changes in earnings in one quarter is not really important. But people react excessively to these things.

Howard Marks

Nobody wants us to be emotionless robot, yet if we set out to do something important to us, this is a lesson that is better to keep in mind.

Lazy holidays

Fabrizio

I have the feeling that social media has made us lazier. I can’t find another way to explain the multitude of indistinguishable posts and newsletters from organisations one is exposed to during the holiday season.

“Merry Christmas from our team!”, “Here’s to a wonderful 2019 together!”, “Happy New Year!”.

Here are few ideas for next year. To stand out from the crowd and attempt to establish a stronger connection with your audience.

  • Tell me how the holidays will impact my business and how I can prepare for that.

  • Tell me how to get ready for the holidays.

  • Give me access to a service that is usually closed, for a limited amount of time.

  • Tell me your story, what you have achieved during the year, what’s on the agend for the next. Make it personal.

  • Raise awareness on a change your organisation wish to make, and explain why it is important to me too.

  • Match all donations to a charity of you choice.

  • Send a gift.

  • Give a discount.

  • Share a video of someone higher up in your organisation while they do something impactful in your community during the holidays.

  • Share a video edit with each one of your employees saying why we should pick or continue picking your organisation the next year.

If any of these ideas work for your organisation, go make it in 2019 and shine in your customers’ timelines or mailboxes during the next holiday season.

We need idealists

Fabrizio

There is a strong misunderstanding when it comes to idealism. It is believed that idealists are dreamers, having their head in the clouds and being incapable of seing the world for what it is.

That makes them particularly unfitting to certain contexts, such as business for example. It is thought that you cannot make business unless you are practical and pragmatic. 

And yet, we do recognise the importance of culture, values, missions, visions. 

If we approach such things from a pragmatic perspective, it might not be worth the work. Actually, it is often true that sticking to company values is so unpractical that we take shortcuts. “This time, just this time” it’s going to be different. We turn a blind eye, we tell ourselves it’s for the greater good. After all we need to be successful, don’t we?

Idealists have the capability to understand that the context we live in (the World, our family, our circle of friends, our team, our company) is filtered through ideas. And that if what we do does not correspond to the type of ideas we want to promote, the gain is just fictitious. In the long run our ideas, the ones we care about, the ones we felt we represented, will degrade and change in meaning. And together with them, our world will degrade and change in meaning.

We need idealists, and we need to make sure we understand that the way we are practical do greatly influence the way we see ourselves and the people around us. We need to facilitate idealists checks on what we are doing, and listen carefully, and change direction if it’s needed.

Idealists might be the most important resource for success, no matter what meaning you give to it. 

You don’t always have to second-guess

Fabrizio3 Comments

Companies invest money and time in attempting to personalise the way they communicate with their customers, both potential and current. If you’ve ever gotten a selection of product or services that was picked “just for you”, you probably already noticed how little they are successful in doing that.

Of course, it is complicated if you don’t ask. You have to second-guess the behaviour of somebody who perhaps stumbled on your website by mistake, just once, and quickly left.

What is troublesome, is that many companies miss the opportunity to personalise when it’s easy. For example, during a customer support conversation.

Here is a different path.

Hi there, it’s great you want to give some friends the gift of learning, kudos to you.

I have to say, at the moment we don’t have gift cards. Yet, I like your idea so much that if you share with me the e-mail address of the friends you’d like to send the gift to, along with a short note, I’ll be happy to set the thing up for you.

I’ll also make a note to our team, as you are not the first to ask for gift cards. I hope we’ll have them by next Christmas, so that you can continue this tradition with your friends autonomously.

Looking forward to help you with this, and in the meantime I wish you a fantastic holiday season.

Free trialling trust

Fabrizio5 Comments

If you are considering offering a free-trial for your subscription-based service or product, you first need to answer the following question with great honesty.

Do you trust your service/product enough to believe customers will stick around after the free trial period ends? 

If the answer is yes, then all you need to get the interested customer started is their e-mail address.

If the answer is no, then of course you’ll ask them to fill a form, enter their telephone number and street address, and provide a valid credit card information before even getting started.