We know this, right? We say it often. We talk about the fact that you can only please all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time and most of the people much of the time or something.

So why on earth are we so resistant to the notion of letting go of an opportunity that’s not a fit for our business?

We scramble to write out “positioning” statements to illustrate why we’re the right choice for a person or company in a given situation. We mash up what we already have to spin it just the right way, in hopes that it will look like we can do the job. Even if it’s not our strength.

If we’re trying to provide solutions for small business owners, why would we waste hours putting together a mammoth proposal for Wal*Mart? One that would most likely send our business into an operational tailspin because if we were to win the contract, we’d have to scramble to find capacity for it operationally (because you certainly don’t buy the team and the infrastructure before you land the deal, right?).

But it happens all the time.

And the real kicker? We are absolutely resistant to the idea that handing off that ill-fitting piece of business to a competitor would be a good business move.

Why? Because we see the short term lost opportunity cost. We see it as driving the engine of the competition rather than fine-tuning our own. We see the trees instead of the forest, thinking that if we’ve lost that customer today, we won’t ever be able to have them.

The problem is that they weren’t going to be our customer. Not today, anyway. If we have to force-fit our company with their needs in order to capture a short term win, what have we done? We’ve put ourselves in the unfortunate position to have to cram a round peg into a square hole, and fulfill a promise we weren’t really qualified to fill in the first place. And that’s likely going to end with a customer who’s not very satisfied, which means not only might we lose the business, but we might lose their trust and respect as well – and those might be irreplaceable.

There’s a fine line between stretching your capabilities to capture a new market when the right opportunity is there, and stubbornly refusing to pick a rock and stand on it.

The backside to listening to the customer community at large is that there will always be someone for whom you are not a fit. You’ll be too big. Too small. Too expensive. Too cheap. Too traditional. Too renegade. Too something.

And if you listen to all of them and try to accommodate their needs, you’ll do nothing well.

But if you’re willing to be honest with yourself and the customer and admit that you might not be a fit for their needs – even send them to someone who would instead – you might just earn their respect and admiration. And down the road, if their needs change or your focus does, you’ve established a basis of credibility and trust that might just win you that business back.

image credit: wwarby

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Picking A Rock to Stand On

We might not be looking for a unified theory for all things quantum in our day jobs, or pondering the discrepancies between particle theory and relativity, but here are a few things Einstein has managed to summarize for us just the same. Funny how some concepts apply pretty universally…

A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.

It all starts with the goals and objectives, but look around you, and you’re sure to see the folks that still think the Facebook Page is the holy grail of social media success. Know what you’re aiming for before you choose any one path to get there.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

We’re hell bent on creating convoluted indexes and formulas to calculate and measure the fuzzy stuff like influence, affinity, or loyalty. As if somehow putting an algebraic formula to it will make it legitimate. Are there simpler ways we can be approaching these seemingly complex problems from a more human level? Is it ever enough to just say “this feels like the right thing to do”, even if we don’t have a spreadsheet upon which to demonstrate the results?

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

You can count a zillion fans and followers but what are you going to do with them when you have them? Are they moving you toward something, or are they just there? And things like having genuine intent or an authentic mindset (not one on a mission statement somewhere) are much harder to quantify and put on a report, but they matter a great deal. They’re part of the untouchable essence of outstanding companies. It’s like porn. You know it when you see it, but it’s awfully hard to define.

Information is not knowledge. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Case studies, case studies, case studies. Oh, how we want to read about what everyone else has done in hopes that it will be the safety net for us not having to do our own planning and strategizing. There are, however, no shortcuts. Precedent isn’t proof, and someone else’s story isn’t likely to be in the right context. There’s a fine line between not wanting to reinvent the wheel, and not wanting to do the thinking for yourself and be accountable for your decisions.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

Loosely translated: majority isn’t truth. Just because “everyone” is doing it doesn’t mean it’s great. Conversely, just because you’re being the perpetual contrarian doesn’t mean you’re any smarter than the rest, you’re just joining the complaint flock. It takes courage and thought to go against the grain, illustrate a new approach, own it, and take actual risks in execution, not just on paper.

Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.

We don’t need a bunch of internet famous people and a confluence of empty personal brands. We need people that do good work and make a difference to the people in their universe, whether on a business or personal level.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

We need more clarity, accountability, and translation of social media into terms that everyone can relate to. Enough with the buzzwords and lingo already. “Joining the conversation” doesn’t explain anything.

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

Teaching and guiding adoption of social media can be an arduous task. But forcing too many rules without context and understanding is a recipe for resistance and resentment. And dragging people unwillingly into the social web before they’re truly culturally equipped will undoubtedly end in failure. Understanding new concepts and ideas takes time, patience, and the willingness of some to make small strides instead of huge leaps.

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.

We all wish that you could just throw up a blog and instantly see a lift in your sales numbers, but it doesn’t work that way. Cultivating a social media community takes more time than many businesses would like. They’re so anxious to know whether they’ve made a good or bad investment, so they demand results and guarantees before they start. But much like the business relationships you’ve built the old fashioned way, creating trust and loyalty is an investment, not a transaction.

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.

In a world where content is everywhere, it’s not enough to just have a bunch of eyeballs see what you do. Value is a wonderful aim, if you understand that value is defined differently for everyone. Your definition of value doesn’t matter when it comes to offering it to someone else. You have to figure out how your customers, prospects, and community define it, and deliver that to them, relentlessly.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Social media is, in many ways, a solution to some of the problems we’ve created ourselves. The divide we’ve created between the company and the customer is one of our own design, and social media is helping to shorten that distance again. As a result, we cannot try and cram social media into the same mindset we’ve used for sales, marketing, and customer service for the last several decades, or we’ll just end up right back where we started, and end up blaming social media itself for not living up to our expectations.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

Authenticity. Trust. Transparency. Community. They’re a bunch of buzzwords – and empty ones at that – unless they’re backed up at a root level, and driven by concrete intent and execution. A poster on a wall or a vision statement drafted in a boardroom doesn’t mean jack unless you’re empowering and allowing the actions that help people deliver on those promises. Period.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

We collected impressions for ads as if having a million people see a billboard without any notion of what they did with that information was actually effective. We build call centers to automate customer service. We talked in “key messages” and soundbites, and we buried our mistakes under PR gloss-overs. Customers are now pushing back on those ideas and demanding better from businesses. Yet, we’re approaching Facebook as an eyeball collection tool, or Twitter as a press release distribution service, or throwing interns to manage our customer support forums, and we’re wondering why we’re having trouble seeing value in these tools?

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

We’re talking about new approaches to business problems, here. We’re talking culture shift. Adjustments to our approach, the courage to evaluate our weaknesses, and the willingness to invest in things that aren’t the same as we’ve always done. All that means that mistakes are inevitable. And rather than lynching and publicly vilifying those that fall short, let’s learn from each other, from ourselves, and start allowing social media a legitimate place in business process innovation.

Not bad for a guy with crazy hair who never tied his shoes, but who managed to single-handedly and drastically change our understanding of the universe around us. I’m thinking we can help businesses do the same for the online world we’re creating here. You?

public domain image posted by BlatantNews.com

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
The Albert Einstein Guide to Social Media

I’m not talking about sponsored posts or tweets – that’s a different argument that we’ll have to have another day.

I’m talking about projects like Third Tribe, or other membership-based learning communities. Or ebooks that aren’t free. Events, either live or on the web. Or time to consult, advise, speak, whatever.

There is a ton of information out on the web that’s free, and it’s given us a bit of an expectation that things we find on the internet shouldn’t cost us anything. But I just don’t understand the griping and whining that happens when someone decides to charge for their stuff.

There are three big reasons I pay for things, have charged money for my expertise and services, and think you have a right to try and do the same:

1. Experience Requires Investment

What you know didn’t get there by accident. Whether it was formal education or learning in the trenches, you paid for your education. You paid in time, in effort, perhaps in money. The stuff that’s in your head and the practical, tangible experience you’ve accumulated over the years. It all cost you something.

Employers pay for that expertise in the form of a salary. Audiences pay for books written by people who have detailed their experiences or knowledge. University tuition costs money. And you can argue all day long about how to determine the value of learning and how to filter out the good from the bad. But the fact remains that experience and knowledge can be worth money, and those that have it have reasons to put a pricetag on it.

2. Concreteness and Context are Valuable

Events cost money to produce. Curating ideas into organized information and content takes time and a certain amount of talent. Making a tangible product or executable services requires time, materials, and management. And doing the research to combine and present information or expertise through the lens of my business can be beneficial.

I’m also willing to pay for some filters to be applied, like knowing that my fellow community members have also invested money to be here, so we’ll all try and squeeze the most value from the experience and contribute in kind.

3. Mistakes Cost Money

Many times, I pay for someone’s expertise or knowledge because I’m paying for the mistakes they’ve already made. I’m buying shortcuts, to a degree. Perhaps they’ve already learned how to apply theoretical knowledge in my industry to a practical solution. Perhaps they’ve failed three times before the fourth time was a charm, and I’m getting the benefit of seeing those potential obstacles before I hit them myself.

Precedent isn’t always proof, but the value in a case study or experienced perspective is that it can help me better navigate the situation that *I* might be faced with, and benefit from someone else’s hands getting dirty first. I know that there are plenty of things I don’t know that I’ve gladly paid for so I can shorten my learning curve and add other people’s context and experience to my ideas.

Value is undoubtedly in the eye of the beholder. Only you can choose for yourself whether spending the money to learn something new is a good risk, and whether you’re likely to walk away better equipped than you were before. Sniffing out the snake oil is partially your job and the due diligence of a business weighing their potential investments. That’s been the truth since the days of hair tonic being hawked on the street in tents.

Don’t think you’re going to get your money’s worth? Don’t pay.

But just because a single endeavor might not be worth the money doesn’t mean that the idea of charging money for something is out of line.  And that means that MLM and “make money online” scams will abound – the opportunists have always existed. Bad apples don’t spoil the entire barrel.

Let’s remember that we live in a world of free enterprise, thank goodness.  And the good side: there will always be a great deal of valuable, helpful, and truly useful information, events, and people across the web that cost a few bucks to access.

We have to put filters on and do some homework. But having the opportunity to earn a living based on the knowledge you’ve built over your career and how you assemble, share, and apply it?

That’s more than okay with me.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
3 Reasons Why Expertise Costs Money