5 reasons Good beats Perfect (almost) every time

 b2b marketing, collaboration, copywriting, creativity, doing, Donner Party, execution, French Enlightenment, fun, Good, Perfect, planning, Rome, strategy, Thomas Friedman, Voltaire  No Responses »
Jan 142012
 

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

This wonderfully compact nugget of wisdom – commonly attributed to Voltaire, the French Enlightenment figure – is a fixture in the vernacular of modern business.

My undergraduate French degree doesn’t qualify me to challenge Voltaire’s intellect. But hey, Voltaire hasn’t done a lick of work in over 330 years. So I’m going to weigh in on his War of Good and Perfect, to see if I can pick a winner.

Here are 5 ways Good beats the crap out of Perfect:

1. Good is quick out of the gate. Perfect debates whether this gate, or that one over there, is the best gate from which to proceed.

2. You probably can’t afford Perfect. But with a savvy mixture of your cash on hand, some pocket lint, and your own creativity (or your talent for inspiring it in others), Good is within reach.

3. Perfect is an egotist. Good is a collaborator. Perfect is an old school, round-world, command-and-controller. Good is a progressive, flat-world, plays-well-with-others hipster. [thank you Thomas Friedman]

4. Good is motion. Perfect is an obsession. Good feels like a hike or a trip to the gym. It’s got a beginning and an end. It makes you sweat. And when you’re done with Good, you feel it (Good). Perfect is like a Scottish poet, locked in a seaside cabin, curtains drawn, brooding for weeks over the next couplet.

5. Good finishes on schedule, or early, and doesn’t expect kudos. Perfect always takes extra time, without asking for it. And if you object, Perfect will lecture you, gazing into the distance, with trite zingers like “time takes time,” or “you can’t rush (me),” or this little gem, “Rome wasn’t built in a day!”

[No, it wasn’t built in a day. It took 1200 years of militaristic expansion, artistic and cultural thievery, slavery, torture, taxation without representation, corruption, massive debt, and general debauchery, until it collapsed, ushering in the Dark Ages. Thanks a lot, Rome!]

Ok, ok. The Rome comparison is probably the right place to throw down a big fat caveat. Because the Romans clearly did some great work. And caveat is a Latin word.

If you consistently reject even the pursuit of Perfect, Good will eventually let you down. Maybe in a big way.

Perfect, for all its faults, wants to get it right. Perfect has been there and done that, and will also listen to others – like Been There and Done That – who have relevant experience. Perfect is willing to consider all the angles. Perfect doesn’t trust quick fixes. Perfect is all about adding value over the long-term. Perfect has calculated the cost (to the penny!) of what happens when Good ends up being Not Good, because Good phoned it in, half-assed it, or took a short-cut. “The Donner Party tried to take a short cut,” Perfect says, annoyingly but with conviction. “And THAT didn’t work out so well, DID IT?!”

[Perfect tends to overindulge in hyperbole.]

So what’s our endgame in the war between Perfect and Good?

Maybe it’s this: Perfect and Good may be enemies. But Too Expensive, Too Late, Half-Assed, and Eaten-For-Breakfast-By-Your-Friends are our enemies.

So let Good and Perfect battle it out a bit. Just be sure to impose a cease-fire before Good Enough and Nearly Perfect end up K.I.A..

Your turn now.  Do you have any more fun personifications to compare — or comparisons to personify — Good and Perfect?

 Posted by on January 14, 2012

Marketing Fowl: The Turducken Problem

 b2b marketing, B2C, considered purchase process, copywriting, marketing communications, product naming  5 Responses »
Nov 222010
 

just because you can doesn't mean you should

“A man’s got to know his limitations.”

The famous Clint Eastwood line from “Dirty Harry” sums it up. I’m  a capable businessman and marketer, but don’t let me anywhere near the creative team when they’re trying to name a product. Oh I can define the product, describe the market for it, detail the buying process and funnel metrics for it, create a promotion or campaign to drive leads for it, etc…. But naming things is not really my forte.

One thing I do know about product names, however, is that the wrong name can be an expensive drain on your marketing budget. To illustrate this point, let’s consider a seasonal example: turducken. For those who – like me until a couple of years ago, or my wife until this morning – have no idea what turducken is, here is the Wikipedia definition:

“A turducken is a dish consisting of a de-boned chicken stuffed into a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed into a de-boned turkey. The word turducken is a portmanteau of turkey, duck, and chicken or hen.”

I haven’t seen any research to back up this claim, but I’d be willing to bet that (far) less than 50% of the U.S. population would be able to accurately define turducken without first asking a friend or looking it up on the Web. And among those consumers curious enough to learn the meaning, a subset would first have to stop giggling at a word that seems to include the concepts of “turd” and “uck.”

None of this is a problem for the individual consumer confronted with this word. His life will resume momentarily, with or without the addition of turducken to his vocabulary, or his oven.

But let’s consider briefly the hypothetical case of a marketer tasked with creating demand for this product. She has a product that has the potential to serve a large and horizontal market (i.e., people who eat gourmet poultry dishes). The product is well-liked among the group of consumers who know what it is. And there are probably some historical trends and benchmarks that can help her direct marketing budget and resources.

That’s all well and good, but what if the hypothetical CEO of Turducken Incorporated — to whom our hypothetical marketer reports — throws down a gauntlet and says she wants to see turducken sales double this year, but only increases the marketing budget by, say, 25%. What should our marketer do? Clearly, small improvement on the organic growth rate will not get the job done. So trying to hit the sales goal by targeting the “turducken-aware” segment is likely to fail. This is a “Blue Ocean” marketing challenge — our marketer will have to find and/or create a whole new market of consumers who are willing to give turducken a try.

This brings us back to bad product names. Before we get excited about something, we usually have to know what the heck it is. Our marketer is quickly going to blow through her budget trying to explain her product to the uninitiated. A too-clever-by-half product name only confuses the prospect and delays the buying process. Two time-honored sales axioms apply here: (a) “a confused customer usually says no” and (b) “time kills deals.” A consumer who is uninterested in learning the definition of turducken is unlikely to buy it (even if he might otherwise enjoy the dish). And any excess time spent explaining a quirky word like turducken is time NOT spent selling it.

Since our marketer doesn’t have a large budget to fund missionary marketing of turducken, she should use simple, descriptive names — perhaps “three bird roast” or “turkey, duck, and chicken roast” — to help quickly define it for new buyers. Keeping the name simple will let her to direct those scarce dollars and resources to more targeted and measurable demand generation campaigns and programs.

 Posted by on November 22, 2010  Tagged with: , , , ,

Every Lead Converts

 b2b marketing, b2b sales, B2C, considered purchase process, copywriting, graphic design, inside sales, lead conversion, lead generation, lead nurturing, marketing automation, marketing communications, marketing to sales handoff, personal training, Pilates, sales effectiveness, sales lead management, social networking, social networks, web marketing  1 Response »
Aug 052010
 

A slight detour for today’s post.  Let’s pay a brief visit to the land of B2C retail fitness, to see if any insights apply to B2B sales and marketing.

One regular “client” of my consulting practice is the Pilates and personal training business my wife Heather and I have owned for the past 3.5 years. I have no formal training in Pilates or personal training, and to be honest, until this year, my physique more closely resembled the guy in the classic “BEFORE” photo than the slimmer “AFTER” version.  For this reason and others, I’ve typically worked more behind the scenes in that business, handling finance, operations, and marketing, supporting our staff and Heather as they support their clients.

Heather wears several hats too, including the very important Head of Sales hat. This is a challenging and rewarding job for her. She helps people make and manage investments in their health. According to HealthyPeople.gov, a service of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, only about 23 percent of adults in the United States report regular physical activity for 20 minutes or longer 3 or more days per week. Heather’s trying to engage the subset of that population who:

  • live close enough to our studio in Seattle to make regular ongoing visits with their trainer
  • are able to invest in private instruction (we don’t offer group classes)
  • are willing to pay for an elective health service not covered or subsidized by insurance
  • are physically able to exercise
  • have the time, or are able to make the time, to attend training sessions
  • aren’t already working with a trainer at another facility
  • value our services, people, facilities, and the way we do business

So yes, Heather has a challenging and rewarding job.  Her business is highly relationship-driven. I know,  I  know, everyone’s business is relationship-driven, but hers really is. She’s learned, and taught me, a ton about how these relationships get started and grow. And as good as she has become at listening to prospects, educating them, and building their trust, the old adage is as true for her as it is for any sales person: you can’t win ‘em all. For any number of reasons, some within and some beyond her control, not everyone she meets will become a client.  But every potential client, whether she meets them or not, will ultimately make some kind of decision, conscious or otherwise.  That decision may be about whether to become a client, or it may be about whether to visit the website, pick up the phone, or ask a current or past client about their experience.  And this brings us back to the theme of this post: every lead converts.

To explore what I mean by this, let’s apply the sentence in the broadest sense possible.

For simplicity, let’s define “every lead” as every person that engages Heather’s business. Not just the people who call her to ask about studio services or rates, or come in for an introductory session, or consider a membership package, but everyone.  Any person who ever:

  • walks by the studio and takes a flyer from the box outside
  • drives by and notices nothing more than the window graphics or other branding elements
  • visits the studio’s web site
  • visits a third party review site (e.g. Yelp)
  • observes or engages in a social media conversation about the business
  • meets a current or previous client at a business function, or a kids’ soccer game
  • meets a current or previous prospect at a [insert business or social event here]

Simplified Conversion Model

And now let’s define “convert” just as broadly. Not just the conversion of qualified prospects into clients, or of leads into qualified prospects, or even of traffic (foot, phone, or web) into leads. Let’s define conversion as any change in a person’s opinion of her business — no matter how strong or subtle, how temporary or permanent, or how grounded in fact or fiction — based on currently available information available.

And now, let’s go one step further and give a B2B-sounding name to this entire cycle of people gathering information and developing their opinions. Let’s call it: the considered purchase process.

Back here in the B2B world, we are trained to be efficient, mechanical, and sometimes even a bit mercenary about demand generation. And the military-industrial language we use to describe our trade – e.g., driving conversion, filling the pipeline, growing revenue (exponentially), launching multi-channel integrated campaigns, etc. – reflects the intense expectations of management that we take the beach deliver results.

But as we focus our energy on the relative few who ultimately decide to buy, it’s helpful to remember that every person’s opinion of our company changes as they interact with us. We may be leaving money or value on the table when we ignore those who don’t take our prescribed next step.  Or worse, we may be creating headwinds for future sales efforts by handling these people in a careless way. Every lead converts, in either a good way or a not-good way. And unless you’re selling to a market of infinite size where no one ever bothers to share their impressions of your business, each one of those conversions matters.

Doing the things that get more leads to favorably convert, more of the time, helps us build healthier pipelines and more predictable revenue growth.

 Posted by on August 5, 2010

Guest post from Bruce Lee: 10 simple techniques to improve your advertising and web site copy.

 b2b marketing, b2b sales, collaboration, copywriting, graphic design, indoor rowing, inside sales, lead generation, marketing communications, marketing to sales handoff, personal training, Pilates, spinal tap reference, Thought Leadership, truth in advertising, Uncategorized, wordpress themes  2 Responses »
Jul 282010
 

[Post #1 in the "Other Voices" series, featuring Bruce Lee of CreativeLee Advertising.]

This week I’ve been doing, with a little help from my friends, a mini-makeover on the TLOTL blog. A few of the changes:

  • Installed a new WordPress theme. Thank you to Sayontan Sinha for giving us the elegant and simple “Suffusion.” I gladly made a small PayPal donation in support of your excellent work on this theme.
  • Replaced the mugshot that was taken when I was 38 pounds heavier. Thank you to my wife Heather, to Concept2 Rowing (makers of my Concept2E Indoor Rower), and to my personal trainers at Conscious Body Pilates for supporting my renewed commitment to improved health.
  • Incorporated the “Tall Poppy” color element from the Scearce Market Development brand palette. Thank you to Penny Laine for your work on the original SMD palette and logo. And thanks to Chirag Mehta for publishing your helpful “Name That Color” lookup tool. The HEX# for that color, C04027, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

I’m throwing shout-outs to these people and companies, some of whom I’ve never met in person, to underscore how much the creative process — in marketing, selling, or anything – is a team game. Which brings me to the fourth change I made to the blog this week: a new tagline.

“Tips, tools, and inspiration from marketing and sales masters.”

I’ve always thought the “Lord of the Leads” concept was about mastery of a process; specifically the process of generating and managing “the leads.” But successful practictioners of the marketing and sales arts understand that real mastery depends on integrating an incredibly diverse range of expertise — strategy, financial, product, creative, technical, analytical, operational — into a compelling buying experience for customers. A marketing leader, in particular, must be highly skilled at eliciting and synthesizing high-value contributions from experts in all of these areas.

So, starting with today’s guest post, I’m turning up the volume (to eleven) on the voices of other experts in the marketing and sales workflow.

First up to bat: Bruce Lee from CreativeLee Advertising. Bruce and I are members of a consultants’ roundtablegroup here in Seattle. Two other similarities: it turns out we live about 1/2 mile apart (98112 baby!), and we both previously worked for companies that were acquired by Best Buy. We are also both self-styled word warriors, though there the differences quickly begin to emerge. Because, quite honestly, I’m Don Quixote to Bruce’s Sun Tzu.

Bruce is contributing “10 simple techniques to improve your advertising and web site copy.”

1.Have someone outside your department read what you’ve written, and ask them if they understand it thoroughly. Chances are you’re using some term that makes sense to you, but not to your intended reader. Someone from outside your fishbowl will catch that.

2.Don’t use acronyms. If it’s important enough to mention, it’s important enough to spell it out.

3.Don’t get cute.Never use any derivation of the Got Milk campaign (for example, “Got Trash?” or “Got Pho?”). Never make any allusion that “size does matter.” Leave humor to the experts.

4. Don’t lie. Exaggeration and hyperbole are lies. Omitting important details, or burying them in the fine print, is a form of lying. Someday soon, credit card companies will pay for this transgression.

5. Proofread it out loud. Then have someone else proofread it out loud while you listen.

6. Say it correctly. “Happens only once a year” is better than “Only happens once a year.” (Only Jack kissed Mary. Jack only kissed Mary. Jack kissed only Mary.) Misuse “it’s/its” or “your/you’re” only if you want the reader to think you’re incompetent.

7. Resist the urge to use an exclamation point. Resist!

8. Unless you’re simply listing a commodity and a price (1 gal. 2% milk, $3) include at least one product benefit. (Chocolate Milk. Builds strong bones and kids love it. 1 gal. $3)

9. Try to find a way to work the word “you” into the headline.

10. Know when to bend the rules. You’re trying to communicate with people using only symbols. But when a person reads, they hear a voice talking in their head. It’s sometimes okay for that voice to start a sentence with a preposition.

 Posted by on July 28, 2010



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