Category: marketing

More rounded

FabrizioLeave a comment

We think of most things as linear experiences.

That’s certainly true in business. The funnel is linear. The go-to-market process is linear. The sales pipeline is linear. The launch of a new product or service is linear. The very same metaphors we use to describe those things (funnel, pipeline, launch) are linear.

And yet, success requires that you circle back and iterate with the new information you have acquired. That you adjust the trajectory continuously with the help of what you are learning as you go.

It turns out that to be succesful in what matters we need to apply more rounded thinking.

Lazy sales

FabrizioLeave a comment

The laziest sales approach must certainly be the following.

I have just came across your company on LinkedIn. Not sure you are the right person to talk to, in case could you connect me to one of your colleagues?

You don’t know my company.

You don’t know me.

You are asking me to do work for you.

I hope you’ll never be asked to resort to this.

Legendary

FabrizioLeave a comment

You can’t start with great.

You might start with average, decent, ok. Or more often, you will start with poor, näive, ineffectual.

And that’s where you will have to continue from. One step after the next. From horrible to passable, from decent to respectable, from good to fantastic.

You can’t start with great.

You can, though, end with legendary.

Aggregate

FabrizioLeave a comment

Who owns customer research? is a misleading question.

A better one is: Who can aggregate customer research and plan actions?

Research does not end with someone sitting down with a customer and asking a bunch of questions. Research is about putting the pieces together, identifying patterns, anticipating trends, sharing the knowledge and the insights, and eventually enabling everyone interested to access all this at their own convenience.

If you do not have someone responsible to aggregate customer research, you are not doing customer research at all.

Wealth of information

FabrizioLeave a comment

Herding information will eventually keep you from doing.

Articles, white papers, eBooks, webinars, podcasts, online classes, books, live and virtual events, tutorials are great resources, when they serve your higher purpose. But they can quickly become a self-serving treat: “just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful” (Assoc. Prof. Ming Hsu).

And clearly, the whole space (physical and mental) you occupy while you feed on information is space you cannot use otherwise. Is space you are taking away from focus, care, delivery.

There will be times in your digital life when you will be subscribed to plenty of newsletters, getting updates from a wealth of podcasts, consuming bottomless blogs, and recycling all of that in social media posts of doubt relevance.

Stop that now.

Find the bare minimum you need and bring the focus back to doing.

For your own sake.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Herbert A. Simon