Seth Godin's Blog, page 323

He's doing his best

In fact, everyone is always doing their best under the circumstances. As my friend Al says, there's no such thing as irrational behavior. That's because in this moment, given the perceptions someone is holding, the way they behave is in fact the only way they can behave.

Consumers don't make choices as much as they react and respond to the inputs and assumptions they have about the marketplace, their life and your brand.

If you don't like the way someone is acting, understand you can't change his

Dashboards

Your users, employees, consumers and donors are obsessed with data now. Are you helping them solve their knowledge problem?

Years ago, I had an automatic transmission car with a tachometer. Why I needed to know my RPMs when I couldn't do a thing about it is beyond me.

Yet useless data and hidden data continue to plague users. I have a Garmin 305 watch to track my bike workouts. It's just fine, except I hate it. I hate it because there are only two pieces of data I care about while I'm working out

The law of the little shovel

If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.

If you walk around town with a little shovel, you'll just end up digging thousands of little holes, not one big one.

Call on one person ten times and you might make the sale. Call on ten people once each and you will likely get ten rejections.

The important thing to remember is that separate events are often separate. If you use the same ineffective approach on one thousand people, it's not going to start working better just because you

Walter's lesson

Here's the thing about the life of Walter Cronkite:

At every turn, he acted as if he had a responsibility to his audience. He didn't do the right thing because he thought it would help him get ahead and then one day he'd get his share. Instead, he always did the right thing because that's who he was. No sellouts, no political consulting, no false transparency.

That's the way it is.

Transparency works if it's authentic.

How to make graphs that work

1. Don't let popular spreadsheets be in charge of the way you look

92% of all the business presentations made in the United States are done with templates created by big companies in Excel or Powerpoint. This is a horrible tragedy.

First, programmers don't often have a lot of taste. The fonts are flaccid, the defaults are wan and uninspiring. There's no sophistication.

Second, and more important, when you show me something exactly like something I've seen a hundred times before, what do you expect

Mowing the lawn

I used to hate the lawn.

Growing up, we lived on a curved street, and as a result, our house had a back lawn much bigger than normal. My job was to mow it, using an old, noisy, non-sharp, broken down mower. I remember it taking about 14 hours a week.

I hated everything about that lawn.

I wonder how your customer service people feel?

Does it show?

Every person who does marketing, sales, product design or any other job that influences customers directly should spend at least an hour a week answering t

Graduation day

True confession: I didn't attend graduation from Stanford Business School. They mailed me my MBA instead. I hadn't been on campus in months, I was already busy running a brand in Boston, learning more than I could have in school. A generous teacher made sure I got the diploma (and of course, they got the tuition, so it was probably a fair trade).

Today, though, I attended final graduation for my informal free MBA program. You can read some of the student recaps right here. The photo was taken jus

Gotcha!

A few weeks ago, my tooth fell out (on a cross country flight no less). I managed to get home and then eagerly put some Anbesol ("for oral pain relief, dentist strong so the pain is gone!") on the hole. Yes, that was my screaming you heard all the way from here.

The next morning, my dentist explained that not only doesn't Anbesol work on exposed nerves, it makes them worse.

You can read the label all day long and you won't see that mentioned. But hey, they made a sale (one sale).

Or consider this

Facts always win, right?

If you're selling a business to business service and you can prove that it's better, that it delivers more value, that it's cheaper or more durable or more efficient, shouldn't that mean you will close every sale?

Even hard-headed business people end up buying the thing they want, not the thing they necessarily need.

The real danger of relying on facts to make your sale, though, is that when the facts are no longer on your side, you're toast. The low-cost supplier gets hooked on the easy sales tha

The CPM gap

Ads online typically cost $5 to $20 for one thousand impressions. A fancy magazine might cost two or three times that. But it's still pennies a person.

Attending a conference, on the other hand, costs $1000 by the time you add up the expenses. That's a CPM of $1,000,000. One thousand of the right people at the right conference costs a million dollars, as opposed to $12 for the same thousand people online.

That seems nuts. Same people, radical difference in price. Apples and oranges. It's not a val