Tag: entrepreneurship

Lost and never found

FabrizioLeave a comment

A while back, I was asked to express the importance of taking a more customer-centric approach in messaging our product.

The best thing I could think of was a slide with these.

Seamless and secure collaboration.
Simple upgrades at no charge.
Connecting data from across the business.
Automated business workflows.
Cloud accelerated ECM.
Security and compliance for all industries.
Secure access to complete information.
Enrich content and gain valuable insights by leveraging artificial intelligence.
Seamlessly navigate the entire process in one place.
Use groups feature to create and manage lists of members.
Rapid automation of manual, repetitive processes.
Digitize and organize business critical information.

People did not immediately understand what I meant, until I mentioned that none of these claims was from our marketing. They could have easily been, but they were actually taken from competitors, alternatives and (some) from generic Saas companies.

Now, imagine you are a customer and you start surfing around for a solution. Imagine how lost you would be by stumbling on this type of messages, and by trying to figure out which product is best for you. And by the way, no. The situation does not improve with more granular and detailed content you can find in the body of the webpage or in other collaterals.

Everybody can say they can do more or less great and amazing things. But very few manage to meaningfully connect to their audience.

Value is how, what and why.

If you stop at what the next time you write copy for your product, expect a result similar to the above.

Nobody likes

FabrizioLeave a comment

There’s quite a lot of time wasted in organizations doing repetitive stuff that a computer would do best. The technology is already available, yet this change is strongly resisted. For two very human reasons.

First, when you cut on repetitive tasks consistently and over time you get to a point at which you have to start letting people go. Nobody likes to do that. Of course, an alternative would be to retrain the people freed of the burden of manual tasks, but that would be two additional problems: finding a good retraining programme that is useful for the organisation, and convincing the employee who has been in the same field for thirty years that’s the right thing to do. Nobody likes to tackle more problems. And so the problems (all three of them) stay.

Then, implementing automation to cut on unprofitable tasks means taking a step back, possibly slowing down for a certain period, until the benefits of having more time starts to kick in. Nobody likes to slow down. With the illusion of continuos growth, we just have to keep going, no matter what. And growth also gives us the illusion that we can throw money at inefficiency, for example by hiring more, therefore further feeding the moster that is wasted time.

The problem is that sooner or later this kind of slack built around the delivery of value is going to take over, and your organisation will become obsolete and replaceable.

It’s an important conversation to have, and you can’t start having it soon enough.

Your own authenticity

FabrizioLeave a comment

Consistency and authenticity are about doing what you expect of yourself, not what others expect of you.

Even when something is useless, even when nobody is paying attention, even when 99.9% of people would act differently, even when you will not get any reward. Doing that is what builds your persona, your character, your set of values, your story. And by doing it repeatedly, you are authentic.

Others are unfathomable, they falter, they change, they do not know you and what you are around to do. They know themselves, and they can choose, each one of them, for their own consistency.

Take ownership of your own.

The duality of change

FabrizioLeave a comment

Change is natural, and yet we repeatedly fail to accept its nature.

We fail when we are the passive recipient of change, as we cling to what was before and find increasingly intricate ways to justify a position we often did not support before realising change was upon us. And we fail when we are the active agent of change, as we seem not capable to appreciate the difficulties change brings in others lives and allocate enough space for discussion and venting.

Change brings resistance and opportunities, dialogue and self-absorption, evolution and involution. It is a continuum of statuses, and where the people affected will eventually land highly depends on how deeply we appreciate the duality of it.

This is something to consider if we are interested in deep change. The alternative is to continue approaching change as a one-sided decision, hoping others will quietly resign to it.

DID marketers

Fabrizio1 Comment

Marketers (but to be honest, this is valid for most business people) suffer from a clear case of dissociative identity disorder, what was once called multiple personality disorder.

On one hand, they are customers. And as such, they are for the most part frustrated and unsatisfied with companies and their services (and I mean services at large, including things such as content, information, knowledge, advertisements, etc.).

On the other hand, though, as soon as they step into their offices, they seem to forget about frustration and unsatisfaction, and they ask their own customers (both internal and external) to navigate through the same pointless odissey they so much hated up until few minutes earlier.

If we would cure this, if we would start concepting, designing, producing and distributing only the type of marketing we would ourselves be happy to consume in our free time, many of the problems of modern marketing would be overcome. And we could focus into winning people’s hearts and minds.