When stumped for a topic, write about your customer

Our customers choose our products and services for emotional reasons. This is true across the spectrum, from gum in the supermarket to a new car. They are buying what our product or service does for the customer – how it makes them feel, not for what it is. When you find out why they buy, that information will help you sell more effectively to them.

Ask questions that invite your customers to talk about their “why”

When we are looking for things to write about on our business blog we should consider calling one of our customers and asking them for an interview. We can then ask some questions and post the Q & A right on our website, with a link to the customer’s site (sharing is good!). I recommend that these interview questions should be along the lines of:

• How can our business help you succeed?
• Why is our product/service important to you?
• What is the impact of this decision upon your own business?
• What happens if you don’t do something about this situation by using our product/service?
• If you were to identify the business tactics most critical to your success, what would be number one?

When we understand our customer’s emotional connection with our product/service and how it influences their need to buy, we can position our product/service in the market for what it will do to address that emotion.

If we can help them address their “need-behind-the-need,” then a prospect becomes a probable purchaser and, ultimately, a customer.

I have a guest post up at Slacker Manager today:

Defining Leadership

When we think of successful leaders we often think of businessmen and political figures that are in the news. In your own field, you can probably name a handful of men and women who are successful leaders – people with vision and the ability to communicate that vision in order to inspire others.

Leadership is defined by your own personality and level of response-ability. Successful leaders are able to define their goals, persuade others to join them in achieving that goal, and lead their teams to success. But what would you say is the definition of leadership?

Leadership involves more than one person

There is no single definition of leadership. Understanding the different facets of leadership is the first step toward becoming an effective leader. Some common traits of successful and effective leaders include:

• A leader is the appointed head of a group, team or organization.
• A leader is a charismatic individual who is able to make good decisions and inspire others to work toward a common goal.
• A leader has the power to communicate clearly and assertively.
• A leader has the ability to influence others in a positive way.

No single definition is more “right” or more important than any of the others. Leadership is defined by your own personality and level of response-ability, that is, your ability to respond to people and events in a manner that leads to a successful communication or resolution. One thing that all of the definitions have in common, however, is that successful leadership involves more than one person.

Read More…>>>

A friend sent me one of those Blonde Joke e-mails, and it made me think about how we communicate, and sometimes mis-communicate:

The blonde flight attendant came down the aisle with the beverage cart and she offered a can of soda to a passenger.
“Just a glass,” the passenger said, “with ice.” The flight attendant handed the passenger a glass filled with ice.
“Can I get some soda in the glass please?” the passenger requested. They both laughed at the misunderstanding.

When we, as human beings, communicate with one another, that communication can break down at any stage. It is important to be careful when we are crafting a message, especially an e-mail or marketing message.

How would you answer these questions about your last communication?

• Is the original message clear?
• Does the receiver hear it clearly?
• Does the receiver understand what he or she heard and interpret the message accurately?
• Does the receiver respond appropriately?

These phases of communication happen almost simultaneously. If there’s a breakdown at any one of these stages, there may be a mis-communication and misunderstanding. Depending on our business, a misunderstanding can be very costly!

We need to make sure that we accurately understand what our customer is telling us. We need to ask as many questions as we need to to fill in the blanks. That way, we won’t have a communication breakdown – and we’ll be able to address what the customer is really looking to accomplish, the proverbial soda with a glass of ice.

I found this article (“Making Peace with Time“) by Michael Gilbert while doing some research on another topic. It is a concise and valuable approach to time management that has eerie similarities to Getting Things Done, by David Allen. As the material will be familiar to those involved in the GTD community, I thought it would make a good fit. The article is actually reprinted from In Context Magazine (1994!), but the timeless technique is still very relevant today, in the 21st century.

As part of our time management practice, Gilbert asks us to do a few things to gain some perspective as to how we use our time. That is, how we would like to spend our time vs. how we actually spend our time, and how we can create a program for reconciling those two ideas. First he talks about the pressures of managing time and activities:

…few of us have a peaceful relationship with time.

But where do we begin to transform this relationship? Most of us start by trying to “get things under control.” We use the very same emotional time pressure that we resent to force ourselves to get things done. We make lists and lists of lists. We put Post-It notes everywhere. We make appointments and create deadlines. We surround ourselves with messages screaming “DO ME, DO ME,” all in an effort to control our desires and behavior.

But control does not work. Control is what a guard does to a prisoner. Control only turns joyful commitments into tedious obligations. This is the major fallacy of traditional time management systems.

Time management should be a tool for reflection and making choices…[Emphasis mine, Ed.]

This is the beauty of the Getting Things Done practice, it’s very essence is comprised of “reflection” (Organize & Review) and “making choices” (Process & Do). Putting our Next Actions in the proper context so that we know exactly what to do right at this moment. Gilbert describes a workshop in which he would teach a three-part decision-making process:

1. How do we really spend our time?
2. What is truly important to us?
3. How can we make our committments more effective?

Following these steps, Gilbert says, will give us a clear picture of the real time-management situation that we are in. In order to discover how we truly spend our time, Gilbert recommends creating a time log, a blank piece of paper divided into three columns: Time, Activity, and Interruption. Carry this paper with you for an entire day, recording your actions and activities, according to these instructions:

Part I: Time Well Spent?

1. Every time you take on a new activity, make an entry on the Time Log. You may feel foolish. It will interrupt your work. Do it anyway and do it for the entire day. Pick a happy medium in defining what constitutes a new activity. (Don’t stop to note every pen stroke, but don’t have only large blocks of time entered as a single activity.)

2. Under “time,” enter the time you start the new activity, to the minute. Under “activity,” enter a brief description of what you’re doing. Under “interruption,” explain why the activity felt like an interruption of your time, if it did. This last column is totally subjective.

Tracking your day like this will allow you to see exactly what it is that you have been doing, so be honest and disciplined about it. You may be surprised at how different it is from what you think that you have been doing. It also allows you to track the types of interruptions that you experience, and when. I would recommend that if you do this excercise, put the completed time tracker in your Tickler File for four weeks later and do it again then. This will enable you to track your progress on staying productive, and managing those interruptions (if possible).

Look over your actions and activities for the day with a hi-lighter in your hand. Hi-light the entries that you consider to be “important”, and make a list of them on a second sheet of paper. Then make a list of the “unimportant” or “interruption” entries. Staple these together and file them in your Tickler for comparison four weeks from now. You may want to write the “interruptions” on a 3″x5″ card and keep it in your organizer so that you can be reminded of what activities you are working on eliminating.

My favorite quote from this article is in the second portion, “To say that everything is important is just as useless as saying that nothing is important”. There must be an order of things, a priority list. Obviously we prioritize things every day, but to paraphrase Stephen Covey, “Are we doing the right things?” To this end, Gilbert adds two more excercises for finding out what our priorities are, and just how valuable our everyday activities are to us:

Part II: Importance Revealed

Exercise I – Good News: Starting tomorrow, you have four extra hours a day! Take five minutes to answer this question: What would you want to add?

Don’t get down on yourself with pessimistic predictions based on how you actually spend your time right now.

Don’t get technical. There are no restrictions on the four hours. They are an invitation to creativity. But don’t accumulate the hours and give yourself extra days off; the point is to focus on daily life.

Take a blank calendar page and fill in a week’s worth of activities and actions, based on what you normally do in the course of a week, but with 28 hours in a day. How much more could you get done? How would you spend that extra time?

Exercise II – Bad News: Starting tomorrow you have four fewer hours a day! Take ten minutes to answer this question: What would you want to cut?

Use the same guidelines as the first exercise. Give in to your ideals and don’t get too technical. This second exercise is difficult. It involves saying no to things, something few of us are good at. But it is an essential complement to the first exercise. Time management is about making choices and there are only 24 hours in a day.

Repeat the excercise with the blank calendar page, only now you must get everything done in 20 hours per day. What has to go?

This can be a tremendously useful method for drilling down into your psyche and finding out what really is important to you. What would you do if you had just four more hours? What would you stop doing if you had to give up four hours? Indeed, important questions that generate more important answers for ourselves and the future of our commitments.

Gilbert prepares us for this type of analysis with this warning about perserverance and responsibility to ourselves. It seems especially relevant in the context of Getting Things Done:

Part III: Committments Made:

But first, before we get intrigued by tickler files and to-do lists, we need to make a fundamental commitment: To improve our relationship with time, we must devote time to time management! But the commitment doesn’t have to be huge: fifteen minutes each day, forty-five minutes once a week, and an occasional longer period of introspection would be an excellent foundation for change.

This is the description of setting your Most Important Tasks*, your Weekly Review, and sets the stage for the Monthly and Quarterly reviews as well. In conclusion, Gilbert sums up with a statement that is right after my own heart, “Make a Habit of Learning“. I will let Gilbert have the last word:

There are several things to remember as you work on changing your relationship with time: First, that it’s a never-ending cycle of learning, and that cycle includes all three of the parts described above. Second, that these are tools for reflection, not control. Third, nothing changes until you get started. When you finish this article, make an appointment with yourself [emphasis mine, one of the most important time management tips! Ed.] to do the Time Log, or any other exercise or tool that caught your interest.

Finally, be willing to pay the price of change. Realize that you cannot do everything and that real life is about choices. Be willing to experience the short-term stress of learning and you will avoid the long-term stress of living a life that is untrue.

*(Thanks, Leo!)