Seth Godin's Blog, page 185

The end of should

Banks should close at 4, books should be 200 pages long, CEOs should go to college, blogs should have comments, businessmen should be men, big deals should be done by lawyers, good food should be processed, surgeons should never advertise, hit musicians should be Americans, good employees should work at the same company for years...

Find your should and make it go away.

A bias for trust

Two very simple truths:

a. Don't waste your time initiating relationships that aren't going to thrive and benefit both sides.

b. Productive connection requires mutual trust. You can't empathize with someone you don't trust.

If you enter an engagement filled with wariness, alert for the scam, the inauthentic and the selfish, you'll poison the relationship before it even starts. Those you deal with won't be challenged to rise to your expectations of excitement and goodwill. Instead, they'll struggle in the face of your skepticism.

Instead of seeking and amplifying the sharp edges, consider focusing on the dignity and goodwill of the people you're working with.

Sure, there are people out there who will disappoint you. But expecting to be ripped off poisons all your interactions instead of saving you from a few dead ends.

An open mind and an open heart usually lead to precisely that in those that you are about to deal with. Perhaps we should give people a chance to live up to our trust instead of looking for the gotcha.

 

The only purpose of 'customer service'...

is to change feelings. Not the facts, but the way your customer feels. The facts might be the price, or a return, or how long someone had to wait for service. Sometimes changing the facts is a shortcut to changing feelings, but not always, and changing the facts alone is not always sufficient anyway.

If a customer service protocol (your call center/complaints department/returns policy) is built around stall, deny, begrudge and finally, to the few who persist, acquiesce, then it might save money, but it is a total failure.

The customer who seeks out your help isn't often looking to deplete your bank account. He is usually seeking validation, support and a path to feeling the way he felt before you let him down.

The best measurement of customer support is whether, after the interaction, the customer would recommend you to a friend. Time on the line, refunds given or the facts of the case are irrelevant. The feelings are all that matter, and changing feelings takes humanity and connection, not cash.

Free range

Ways to improve your performance:

Compete for a prize

Earn points

Please a demanding boss

Make someone else's imminent deadline

Face sudden death elimination in the playoffs

Wear a heart monitor and track performance publicly

Go head-to-head against a determined foe

The thing is, all of these external stimuli are there to raise your game and push you ever harder. They are fences to be leaped, opponents to be defeated.

The alternative is to compete against nothing but yourself. To excel merely because the act of excelling without boundaries or incentives thrills you.

And the good news is that once you find that, you'll always have it.

Toward a mobile app for this blog

Every few days, someone asks for a new mobile app for the blog. I've been ducking the issue for a while, because I'd like it to be something worth using, but I don't have a passionate or commercial interest in creating one--it's not a focus of mine. But it's time.

One approach is to just license my RSS feed to anyone who wants to build an app around it. I'm hesitating to do that, because if it has my name on it, I'd like it to be reliable, and the app store makes it hard to tell the good ones from the not so good. So I thought I'd ask developers if they'd like to take this on, and what they'd like to do if they did. We might end up with two or three approved apps that you could choose from. They might end up being free or costing money. We'll see. My goal is for it to be easy for you to use and really headache-free for me to create.

If you're a developer and you'd like to suggest yourself for this project, here's a simple form to fill out.  Please don't email me about it, but I promise to review the first forty applications I receive. Deadline is November 2, and as usual, extra points for being early.

Everybody knows everything

William Goldman famously pointed out that before Hollywood releases a picture, nobody knows anything about how it's going to do. It's such a black art that there are no real clues, yet every self-important exec acts as though he's an expert. It's easy to pretend expertise when there's no data to contradict you.

The internet and the connected economy turn much of that on its head. Now, in many fields, you have to assume that everyone knows (or can easily know) everything.

Relying on the ignorance of a motivated audience isn't a long-term strategy.

No one ever bought anything on an elevator

If your elevator pitch is a hyper-compressed two-minute overview of your hopes, dreams and the thing you've been building for the last three years, you're doing everyone a disservice. I'll never be able to see the future through your eyes this quickly, and worse, if you've told me what I need to know to be able to easily say no, I'll say no.

The best elevator pitch doesn't pitch your project. It pitches the meeting about your project. The best elevator pitch is true, stunning, brief and it leaves the listener eager (no, desperate) to hear the rest of it. It's not a practiced, polished turd of prose that pleases everyone on the board and your marketing team, it's a little fractal of the entire story, something real.

"I quit my job as an Emmy-winning actress to do this because..." or "Our company is profitable and has grown 10% per week, every week, since July," or "The King of Spain called me last week about the new project we just launched."

More conversations and fewer announcements.

Raise and lower (more for less)

What if you discovered that due to a tax implemented by invisible interstellar aliens, you would have to increase the price of what you sell by 10%? What would you add to your offering so that people would still choose you despite the fact that all of your competition hadn't raised their price? What sort of service, guarantee, design or other free prize bonus would you add to maintain your market share?

And now, having survived that, what if you discovered that you had to reduce your costs by 10%? What would you take out of your product or service so that you could still profitably sell your product even though it must cost you 10% less to make?

Of course, the interesting thing is what happens if you do both at the same time, when there are no aliens slowing down your growth, increasing your costs or hindering your sales...

The beaten path

Here's a common mistake: make something amazing and figure that people will beat a path to your door.

Or go to a retailer or a sales rep or a middleman and expect that they will offer your product or service to their customers and let you keep most of the profit.

The beaten path isn't something that happens to you, it's something you build. It's not something convenient, it is, in fact, the primary asset of your organization.

Attention and trust are worth more than just about anything else, because they make it likely you have a chance to tell your story, which might resonate, which then leads to the beaten path. It's the last step, not the first..

Meeting expectations

In many settings, happiness and success are measured in terms of whether or not expectations were met (or exceeded).

From the stock market to tech to what's under the Christmas tree, we let expectations determine whether or not something good has happened. Not whether it was useful or kind or productive or delightful, but whether it beat our fantasies.

There are two things you can do with this truth:

1. Spend a lot more effort managing expectations, and

2. Focus on the wonderful instead of the exceeded.

Brands and stocks and careers that are here for the long haul do both.