Tag: relationships

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.

An act of kindness

FabrizioLeave a comment

Forgiveness is something you owe yourself.

It’s an act of kindness towards your well-being more than a courtesy to others. Because of course, others will be relieved by the fact you are forgiving them, they will be happy and feel like they can continue with their lives with one less burden.

But you. You will be so much lighter if you make of forgiving a consistent practice. You will be freed of damaging thoughts, anxiety, bad feelings, toxic memories that drain your energy. Even when it’s seem that it’s not a big deal, that you barely think about the whole fact, not forgiving is a black hole that sucks you in. It’s unrelenting. It’s negative.

Give yourself the space to achieve what matters. Genuinely forgive, and move on.

Never a good idea

FabrizioLeave a comment

It’s never a good idea to decide what’s better for the customer, for example by defaulting your new application to “launch on start”.

Even if that would supposedly improve their experience.

Particularly if you are in the business of making their digital life safer and more controlled.

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.

The emperor has no clothes

Fabrizio1 Comment

A good portion of traffic on the internet is made up.

Voice search optimization is not as important as we thought it was.

The importance of videos for marketing has been inflated.

In the first three months of 2019, Facebook has removed nearly as many fake accounts as there are real ones (2.2 billion to be precise).

The story of cheap and easy, of “anybody can do it”, of the death of traditional marketing, of of infinite reach and segmentation is cracking on multiple sides.

We have been fed an illusion, an utopia, and we believed it because it was a shortcut.

It’s beyond time to point the finger and wake the masses of marketers up by simply stating the obvious. The emperor has no clothes.