Tuned In: Uncover the extraordinary opportunities that lead to business breakthroughs.

Don't Try to Fix Your Weaknesses

"You can't put feathers on a dog and call it a chicken."--Dr. Phil McGraw

Bumped into a great new manifesto this week on ChangeThis. David Rendall, author of The Four Factors of Effective Leadership turned out a very bright and clever perspective on the fallacies of fixing weaknesses. With an in your face title The Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness By Flaunting Weakness, Rendall encourages you to stop spending time trying to fix the things you aren't good at it and maximize your strengths. He cites a Gallup survey that said 59% of us believe that fixing weaknesses is an essential part of personal development. Is it for you? 

Well, how's that working for you? 

I had to laugh at some of the stories and descriptions of folks trying to push rocks uphill on their own personal transformations. And, the power of just ignoring them and moving on.  Rendall clearly points out the problem:

1. Fixing weaknesses is a slow, painful process. 
2. We don't enjoy anything about it. 
3. It distracts us from activities where we could make significant progress and find fulfillment.
4. It doesn't actually work. Even if we fix it, it doesn't become a valuable strength. 

There are so many places I could go with this. We definitely found that Tuned In leaders and Tuned In businesses had the DNA built in to them that almost oozed 'we are who we say we are and we aren't trying to be anything else'.  The authenticity seemed to make it easier for them to execute in every facet of their business and create a unique platform for positioning themselves well in the market. 

But, what about the rest of us who aren't there yet?  Rendall got me to thinking about how much time we spend in upgrading products by adding features that address the latest complaints. Or hiring people into the company to fix a discipline that you are executing poorly.  Or teaching technical professionals how to be more people and sales-oriented. Or sales folks to be more technical. To what end?  Does it ever occur to us that maybe there is an underlying reason to begin with that is hard to change and maybe not worth changing? 

I love one of the 'Freak Facts' buried in Rendall's manifesto ... "every weakness has a corresponding strength." Find it and you can begin the process of creating something valuable and unique for not only yourself but also for your business. The simple fact is that we are always intrigued and attracted to the ones that stand out. But, we seem to have been educated more often than not to be similar and well-rounded. Why?  Mediocrity is never rewarded in the long run. Getting the growth, profit and satisfaction rewards we saw with those who got Tuned In always had a little bit of the Freak Factor built in to them.

 

Are you a sales guy?

I've noticed that over my twenty years in the business world, titles for sales guys have become ever more grand and difficult to understand.

My first business card said "Sales Representative" and my friends in sales at other companies had the same thing or something similarly descriptive on their business card.

Now I see things like "Business Development Director" or "Client Care Specialist" or even "Marketing Manager" on salespeople’s business cards. Many of these titles seem a bit sleazy – a bait and switch sort of thing to hide the fact that the person is in sales. If your company is tuned in, why do you need to hide the fact that you're in sales?

Several weeks ago I keynoted the Home Theater Specialists of America conference in Rancho Mirage, CA. At the event, I met several people from SpeakerCraft including Jeremy Burkhardt, the company president.  Jeremy and his company are tuned in and they are honest.

Jeremy's bio on the company site says, among other things "Perfect Day-wake up at the beach with my son, surf then wake board then sky dive then snow board then jump in the plane fly to mile marker zero at the Grand Canyon and white water raft to camp where we would eat and sleep under the stars." Honest man, that Jeremy. At the conference, he rode a skateboard from building to building at The Westin Mission Hills.

I was amazed when I received Steve Hayes’ business card at the conference. He works at SpeakerCraft too. His title? "Sales Guy."

Funding New Ideas

How do you get new ideas funded today?  There have been some interesting posts this week on the topics of How to Fix Venture Capital and Why opposing the  Northwest/Delta merger is dumb. Both got me to thinking about a fundamental problem we seem to have today in business. Whether I look at from the bottom-up as an entrepreneur or from the top-down as a big company executive, it seems to me that the very engine that drives our economic growth is in jeopardy.

When did we become so risk averse to new investments?

It's almost as if we equate new investments these days with money up in smoke. And breakouts like Google or Salesforce.com as more luck than anything else. In fact, as Umair Hague points out in his Harvard Business Review blog on the Edge Economy, many really big ideas were funded to be acquired in the last decade. He asks a pretty poignant question ... what if Google had taken the $3B it was offered in 2002 when it was half the size of Yahoo and became the search product line of one of the big three portals? His challenge to the VC industry is to embrace the environment that allowed them to emerge as a platform for growth of the industry with all of their investments. 

Similarly, Greg Strouse looked at the problem from the other end and asks incredulously why anyone would speak out about the dangers of Northwest and Delta merging. Putting aside paid special interests creating mouthpieces on news shows, why would we have any fear that putting two failed big companies together would negatively impact the customer? The markets have consistently shown that this type of end of life cycle mergers only spawn bigger opportunities for new entrants to emerge. Do we think that noone out there is capable of creating a new kind of carrier that can deal with the realities of high fuel costs and a buyer demanding more flexible services? 

Unless we're afraid that we no longer have the stomach to find, fund and launch new ideas. 

This seems to me to be the single biggest thing to worry about in the economic environment we have just moved into. Short recession, long, non-event ... who knows?  But, the relatively speaking continual decline of new offerings being launched to market is eroding our global advantage as a leader. Rather than whine about it though, I'm thinking its time to align to the new realities of a conservative investment community and begin to pragmatically identify real 'tuned in' ideas for funding.

The process we discovered and documented in our book seems to me to be the perfect filter in todays environment for funding a new idea. It focuses on finding a discrete problem in a target buying audience that is quantifiable ... and then adds the innovation to create an experience and marketing idea that will resonate authentically with it's audience. Why is this a great approach to run your new investments through?  Because it filters out fads and finds fundable ideas that are sustainable.

Every success story we uncovered in our Tuned In research had these fundamental elements at their core. They also had leaders, teams and yes ... investors ... that bought into the mission and embraced it for the long haul. Maybe it's time we started following their lead. If you put your new idea through the Tuned In filter, it's much more fundable!   

Tuned In Partnerships

I've been watching the news around Yahoo, Microsoft and Google lately with great interest and wondering about the wisdom of the strategies behind each of moves and counter-moves being made. This week Yahoo and Google announced a partnership to consolidate their search advertising businesses (assuming a successful test of the concept). The markets yawned, expecting little to no change in the market positions of each.   

Why do so many partnerships fail?  Estimates are that 80% or more leave the companies worse off than when they started. Unfortunately, that really only measures the strategic ones ... mergers and acquisitions ... not the plethora of agreements that cover joint product, service, marketing or even distribution relationships.

It always seems like a good idea. Rather than develop the capability yourself, leverage a third party with the expertise your firm lacks (or is non-competitive). Faster time-to-market, lower costs and the ability to provide your customers with a whole product solution make the business case for combining a 'no brainer'. But then reality sets in. Culture clashes. Product overlaps need to be resolved. Execution suffers when the customer facing organizations realize they have different objectives and selling models. Management struggles over control with an equal zest for leading the change and maintaining status quo of their pet projects. 

We've been studying how the Tuned In model applies to these kinds of scenarios and found that it provides a great filter for making the go/no go decisions that uncover the 20% that are not only good ideas but executable:

1. What market problem is the partnership solving?
2. Will new buyers be attracted?
3. What is the incremental impact of the change to existing customers, employees or partners?
4. Which part of the overall experience will be better?
5. How will you communicate a powerful new idea that the partnership brings to the market?
6. Can each company still maintain (or improve) their ability to establish an authentic connection with potential new buyers? 

In truth, most partnerships fail because these questions are never asked. And, fundamental misalignments are overlooked. This is mostly because many partnership strategies are developed inside-out ... in the boardroom using only financial analysis as a filter ... or in some cases fear of avoiding the alternative.

So, how do the big three rate on the Tuned In filter? Well, I'm suspicious that it's not very well. Nothing in their communication to the marketplace thus far has even addressed the core issues of creating new value for the market or offering new solutions. It's only focused on fixing problems Microsoft has with its MSN business or Yahoo has competing in search or Google has if the other two merge. How will this make their businesses or consumer value better off?   

How about your partnerships?  Are they Tuned In or Tuned Out? 

      

Please… Eliminate gobbledygook!

Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, mission-critical, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I'm gonna puke!

Just like with a teenager's use of catch phrases, I notice the same words cropping up again and again - so much so that the gobbledygook grates against my nerves and many other people's, too. Well, duh. Like, companies just totally don’t communicate very well, you know?

Most of the thousands of Web sites I've analyzed over the years and the hundred or so news releases I receive each week are laden with these meaningless gobbledygook phrases.

To create effective marketing, Web content that people want to share, you must eliminate gobbledygook.

Whenever you set out to create something to reach people, you should be developing content specifically for one or more of the buyers that you want to reach.  You should avoid jargon-laden phrases that are over-used in your industry. In the technology business, words like "mission-critical," "industry-standard," and "cutting-edge" are what I call gobbledygook. And the worst gobbledygook offenders seem to be business-to-business technology companies.

For some reason, marketing people at technology companies have a particularly tough time explaining how products solve customer problems. Because these marketers don’t understand how their products solve customer problems, or are too lazy to write for buyers, they cover by explaining myriad nuances of how the product works and pepper this blather with industry jargon that sounds vaguely impressive.

If you want to be successful online, eliminate the gobbledygook and speak like a real person. Use the words and phrases that your buyer personas use.

If you want to learn more, consider reading my (free) Gobbledygook Manifesto published by ChangeThis.

What's wrong with Sam's?

I live in Scottsdale, Arizona where we have two big box retailers, Costco and Sam's, only about 1,000 feet apart. Add to that a Walmart and a Target all within a half-mile as the crows fly and you have a buyer's market when it comes to discount retailing.

Ironically, of the four, the Sam's Club is the distant laggard. It would appear that the Costco, which carries virtually the same inventory, does about ten-fold the business. My preference is Costco but I keep my membership at Sam's when I want to make a quick purchase as I can count on their store being mostly devoid of customers.

So why does one store thrive and another falter in the same geographic area with similar offerings and prices?  From my experience, it is a collection of Tuned Out attitudes in management at Sam's. There have been numerous times that I have filled my cart, rolled up to check out, and found long lines at the cashier stands. With well over a dozen check-out stands, management rarely staffs with more than two cashiers. Instead of waiting 10 minutes to check out, I just leave the cart at the front of the store, mention my disgust to the supervisor, and walk out. I figure if they have to replace my items on the shelves, they will get the message. 

They haven't so far. In fact, in one incident, the supervisor argued with me that their cashiers were "busy doing other things."

So yesterday, they actually had an open cashier and I was being rung up in no time. But before I could pay, the cashier stopped and asked if I wanted to upgrade my membership. I asked, "What is that going to do for me?"

She replied, "Well it normally is $100 but we can pro-rate it for the year and it will only be $68." As I observed the line of customers waiting to checkout behind me begin to swell, I asked, "Well that doesn't solve any problems for me; why should I give you even $68?" I won't bore you with the entire list of meaningless benefits that she stumbled through including "Discount roadside assistance" but suffice it to say that I didn't buy the upgrade. I don't know if anyone abandoned their cart as this sales pitch transpired but I'm sure I would have. 

Not only was there no compelling problem solved by their offering, but they were selling in a stressful scenario and at the expense of other clients by a "salesperson" not prepared to communicate with me. If they had asked, I would have suggested that they set up a stand as you enter the store, staffed with someone who can relate what the upgrade will do for me, and allow me to ask questions at my leisure.  But knowing Sam's, they'd take a cashier off duty to "man the booth."

Apple Tunes In to Universities

Apple continues to impress with their ability to tune in to new market opportunities. The iPhone is their latest hit product and one that already resonates in a big way with college-age buyers. They have been capturing share in that age group consistently since the product's introduction last year. So, why not leave well enough alone?  Well, maybe it's because ...

Tuned In businesses focus on turning great products into great experiences for distinct buying groups!  They know that when they do, they create sustainable competitive advantages that last years to decades.

A colleague of mine pointed me to a great example of this in Apple Universities program to distribute iPhone's to incoming students at Abilene Christian University in Texas. More than just offering a device though, the phone is fully integrated to the physical and social networks of the university. New students can now register for classes, establish Facebook groups, sign-up for events or even connect to local businesses to order supplies or maybe a pizza for delivery.

 

The use of the applications has even been captured by the students in a 20 minute YouTube video called Connected. The film captures the day in the life of a new student and how integral their new iPhone is to how they live and optimize their time. 

Beyond the coolness factor that will no doubt resonate with college age audiences everywhere, I'm impressed with Apple's ability not to get so caught up in the momentum of their initial product launch to fail to notice that at the end of the day, their device is after all just a device unless it's fully integrated with the services that folks use on a daily basis. They hit it out of the park with iPod because they realized quite correctly that the real issue was the ease of downloading music and the ability of iTunes to make it simple was the breakthrough. Now they're focusing on the things that will make the iPhone sticky and delivering solutions for unique buyer personas. The college crowd is unique and further those attending ACU are unique. The solution offered here is powerful. 

Creating a resonator is not just coming up with a hit product. You have to finish the job and work it completely into the lives of the individuals who will buy it. When you do, you create a breakthrough experience that allows word of mouth to take over and the number of sales that come from referrals increases exponentially. I learn more from these kinds of breakthroughs than I do from the original innovations themselves. Well run, Tuned In companies seem to have a knack for sticking with it and finding real problems to solve that make their little breakthrough a big one. Apple has certainly done that here.