Author: Karthik Suresh

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What’s The First Thing You Should Do When Starting a New Sales Campaign?

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Thursday, 9.04pm

Sheffield, U.K.

So, you’re in charge of a sales program – a consultative selling one. You’ve got targets, a resource plan, a budget. You’re ready to go. You just need to start prospecting.

Or do you?

Before you start doing anything you should ask yourself a question. Is what you’re about to do worth doing at all?

The reason for asking yourself this question is that the answer you give will decide how you spend your time. And the results you get will come from doing those things hour after hour, day after day.

You reach your goals as a result of all that work you put in over time. So, it makes sense to just check whether it’s the right work for you to be doing.

Let’s start with an example. You’ve just started a new sales role. What does your manager expect you to do?

You’re probably expected to do the modern day equivalent of knocking on doors. Pick up the phone, send emails, connect on social media. Be active. Be busy. More importantly, look busy.

You need to ask yourself whether that is the best use of your time. Let’s say that you’re not actually a professional salesperson. You’re a professional that has now been asked to get some sales in.

You’re actually good at doing something like accounting or law or working with technology. Now you need to go out and get business and the easiest, most obvious way is to “smile and dial”.

The thing that you miss by doing that is the cost of sales.

When your customer buys anything from you they pay a price. Let’s say that price is one hundred dollars. After you do everything you do in your business, you’ll end up (hopefully) with some cash in your pocket. Let’s say that’s 7 dollars.

Sounds good?

Not really. The stuff that eats up the money in the middle is operating costs – everything you need to do to actually deliver what you’ve promised the customer.

Then, at the front end is your cost of sales, the cost of actually getting to your customer and getting them to part with the money in their pocked for what you do.

Why does understanding the cost of sales matter? It matters because you can’t decide what activities are the best use of your time if you don’t price them correctly.

What are your options for bringing in business? Some of these might be on your list:

  1. Personal selling – you pick up the phone.
  2. Hire a salesperson
  3. Advertise
  4. Pay an introducer’s commission

Options 2, 3 and 4 have a defined cost associated with them. Option 1 seems free. It’s only free, however, if you value your time at zero. If you place any value on your time whatsoever, you need to decide whether it’s cheaper to go for one of the other options.

The problem is that in consultative sales, 2 and 3 have problems. You can’t easily advertise a product or service when you don’t even know what problem you’re going to solve. Perhaps you haven’t built the product yet.

Then, hiring a professional salesperson has the problems that come with an expensive resource that probably doesn’t have the deep domain knowledge you need to do a decent consultative sell. Your ideal consultative salesperson is someone who knows how to do the job as well, probably one of your operational folk.

These people, however, don’t want to pick up the phone and harass people. They aren’t good at playing the numbers game and just hammering on. They want to do good work and, if they can get in front of someone, they can explain what they do and probably get some business signed. It’s the getting in front of people that’s the problem.

Which leaves the last option – pay an introducer’s commission.

The chances are that there are people out there who spend all their time getting to know people. That’s their thing. If they’re confident that they can get you in front of the right people – and you’re confident that when you’re in front of the right people you can close a deal – then you’ve got a sweet thing going.

You should be happy to pay an introducer’s commission in this situation. You’ve saved hours of time that you can now spend on your business. The introducer makes some money and can carry on partying and meeting people. Everybody wins.

Unless someone gets greedy.

There’s an element of fairness involved. If you try and set your introducer commission too low, then you won’t get any takers. If they want too much or try and grab a slice of ongoing business, then you’re going to have to deal with that.

The best way is to have a number of introducers and negotiate a fair commission, say 20% of the first deal carried out as a result of an introduction. That will keep them bringing you new customers and you’ve got the opportunity to sell more to them later. Logically, you should be willing to pay the introducer whatever it takes – even if your profit on that first deal is zero – as long as you can make it up on the back end – the follow on sales.

It’s only when you decide that there is no way you can set up an arrangement where you pay for sales that you should do it yourself. That’s when you need to sit at your desk and start making calls and sending emails.

If you’re smart, however, you’ll spend your time finding people that can introduce you to the people you need to meet and get a commission agreement in place with them.

Then, you’re actually going to get some real traction in your sales campaign.

So, in summary, the first thing you should do when starting a new sales campaign is not to try and find prospects, but try and find people who can introduce you to prospects. Start building your referral network. That will free you up to focus on selling.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

As a reminder, this is the fourth post in a series that I’m planning on eventually collecting into a book on Consultative Selling. If you are reading this and are interested in this topic, please let me have any feedback, good or bad, so I can make this as useful and easy to read for you as possible.

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How To Figure Out What Your Brand Is Doing For You

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Wednesday, 9.27pm

Sheffield, U.K.

How is branding important in consultative sales and how can you make the best use of your brand?

Entire books have been written about brand – what they mean and how you get one. Some people think that it’s as simple as a logo, while others talk about the entire experience people have when they interact with you in any way.

Branding can be looked at very simply for our task of consultative selling. You just need to ask how your customers and prospects feel about you?

If they like, admire and trust you, that’s great. That’s the place you want to be.

That’s what many modern internet influencers have built a business on. They know that if you listen to their podcasts or read their blogs and find that what they tell you or show you is good then, when they eventually ask you to support them by buying something, you’ll be much more likely to want to reach into your wallet.

It’s very clear when people do something because they want to help you and when they do something because they want to help themselves.

Take the Tim Ferriss podcast, for example. It’s one of the most widely listened to business podcasts in the world.

Tim started it as a distraction when his previous book, which he’d worked on really intensely, failed to take off. Burned out, he started a podcast, interviewing successful people and trying to find out the routines and habits that helped them get where they were.

Now, if Tim mentions a product on his podcast, it sells out within days. That’s because he offers a trusted shortcut. He’s done all the work needed to find information, test it and bring the best bits to you. Now all you have to do is take those results and use them.

The best blogs and podcasts and companies make you feel a certain way about them. These days it’s increasingly not about what they say, but about what they show you.

That’s an area where companies that keep a tight rein on marketing struggle. They can’t make themselves more human and, let’s face it, no one is really interested in what a company does. They’re interested in what it means for them. And they’re nosy – they want to see what other people are up to.

So, an easy way to develop a brand is to be radically honest. Show it like it is. Show your work, show what you do, give people a peek behind the scenes.

This is vital in consultative sales, which happen only when people trust you. The more you show of yourself, the more information they have to judge whether you’re consistent, authentic and trustworthy or an opportunistic con artist.

So, if brand is how you make people feel, the products you offer are what you help them do. The product is the hammer you’re selling.

Take a site like Monevator, for example. That started as a finance blog about getting rich slowly. The authors have put a lot of work into making it easy to understand the options open to you.

If you want to start a pension or choose a collection of cheap index trackers, the site tells you how you can do it quickly and easily. You can save thousands by making a few simple decisions, starting with actually opening an account.

Once you use and trust a site like that then there is a good chance you’ll buy products that they recommend. In my case, it’s often books. It takes me seconds to decide to get a book if it’s recommended on a site I trust. That’s the power of its brand.

The biggest mistake people make about branding is thinking that brand is about the physical things in front of you – the logo, the fonts, the packaging. And it is that – but it’s more. It’s about what sort of feelings you evoke in the people you work with.

In consultative selling, this comes across in the way you act with a prospect. The biggest problem with selling something intangible is that people can’t judge whether you’re any good or not. You might just be good at talking. You might be showing work that someone else has done – but they’re not sure whether you can actually do it yourself.

If you insist on someone signing a contract before you’ll show them anything at all, you’ll find the task of selling to them much harder. The secret is having lots to talk about. Lots to show and tell about what you’ve done.

Here’s the thing. Advice is cheap to give. Ideas aren’t worth much. In a consultative sale, the money comes in because you are hired to execute – to deliver on a promise. To get hired, you have to show that you know your stuff, and that comes from good old show and tell.

The way in which you do your show and tell – in front of a customer and in the various media open to you – will set up and reinforce the brand you’re trying to create. Ideally, you want people to know you before you talk to them. If that isn’t possible, you want them to feel good about you quickly. The worst thing is to have people feel apathetic.

The approach to take in modern consultative sales is probably this. My advice is free or low cost. I give it away on my blog and in my books. My time is what you pay for – and paying for my time is well worth it because of the results I’ll deliver for you.

In other words, spend all your time creating your brand. The products you sell can come later in the process, when your prospects are comfortable with you – even if you’ve never met them in person.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

As a reminder, this is the third post in a series that I’m planning on eventually collecting into a book. If you are reading this and are interested in this topic, please let me have any feedback, good or bad, so I can make this as useful and easy to read for you as possible.

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What Does Being Ethical Have To Do With Anything?

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Tuesday, 10.13pm

Sheffield, UK

No one ever admits to doing anything shady. Do you?

Yes you might just add something onto your expenses once in a while or increase your commission just before signature on the off chance that no one will notice. Perhaps you have to say that the thing you’re selling works in dusty conditions even though you know it doesn’t because you’ll be fired.

The fact is that in business you often have to bend the truth. After all, everyone is only looking to hire someone with experience, someone who has done the job several times and is also the cheapest on the market. If you’re relatively new, you might have to big yourself up, talk confidently – after all, confidence sells.

So where do you draw the line. At what point do you realise that you’re doing something that’s unethical. And does it matter?

It might seem a little strange to jump into the ethics of selling so quickly – after all you’ve just started reading this book. Surely that’s something to worry about later – after you’ve got your customers and business. Can’t you retrofit ethics into your business?

I think it’s important to start with understanding your own position on being ethical in selling, especially when it comes to consultative selling.

The aim of a consultative selling process is to help your prospect arrive at the right choice for him or her. David Maister, Robert Galford and Charles Green write about this as being a Trusted Advisor.

Trust has to be earned. As the saying goes, it takes a lifetime to build up a reputation and seconds to destroy it. The problem is that sometimes you have to make hard choices – between what you get or lose and what is the right thing to do.

Sometimes it’s the other way around. You’re doing everything right, but your client is the one that acts badly. That hurts as well. You learn not to trust people like that.

Here’s a suggestion on how to approach ethical selling.

Let’s assume you’re not in the business of outright lying – selling something you know is complete rubbish.

What you have is valuable to your customer, but also has pros and cons. What do you do in that case? More importantly, what will the salesperson you hire do?

For starters, the way they act will probably depend on the way in which you pay them. If what they make is heavily dependent on a commission on the sale, then they’ll do everything they can to flog your product, including lying through their teeth.

If they’re on a salary and don’t lose or win based on the sale, then their primary interest will be in serving the customer. They’ll probably take a more objective view.

In my experience, a pure salesperson compensated on the first basis struggles to make any sales at all. There’s a conveyor belt of them, moving from firm to firm as they come in, get all excited, make some noise, find it’s actually quite hard, then move or get pushed out.

On the other hand, quiet consultative folk, possibly the ones in charge of the business or experienced at doing the work, have one conversation, figure out what the customer needs, put in one proposal and end up getting some business.

If you run a business that is designed around a hard sell process, you’ll attract a certain kind of staff and create a certain kind of culture. The problem is that the bad will drive out the good in this situation.

What you really want is a team around you that are dedicated to serving the customer first and making money second. It may seem idealistic, but if you do good work and add genuine value, then you will be entitled to a fair share of that value you create.

If you truly create value, the compensation will follow.

It’s also important that you have a clear idea of the kind of clients you want to work with. Isn’t it better to have a small number of clients who value your advice, that you can really serve and pay attention to closely and get along with rather than a large number who don’t trust you?

As Warren Buffett says, a good rule is to only work with people you like, admire and trust.

When it comes down to it, however, there’s only one thing you need to remember to know that you’re acting ethically.

You know the golden rule – treat others in the way you would like them to treat you.

To really operate in an ethical way – follow the platinum rule. Treat others the way they would like to be treated.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

As a reminder, this set of posts is part of a series that I’m planning on eventually collecting into a book. If you are reading this and are interested in this topic, please let me have any feedback, good or bad, so I can make this as useful and easy to read for you as possible.

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The One Thing To Understand About How Sales Works Now

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Monday, 8.56pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I had my first real lesson in how sales works as I sat in the back of a lecture hall listening to Neil Rackham, the author of Spin Selling, talk about his research into the secrets of successful selling. I listened and took notes as Rackham took us through how organisations changed over the last few decades, morphing from lumbering, inefficient beasts to lean, hyper-competitive machines, operating in the age of the Internet.

The world of sales has changed too, as a result. The approaches and lessons of the past cannot be applied blindly today. We need to examine them critically, look at what works, what doesn’t work and what we need to do differently to be successful now.

This starts with understanding the basic framework in which everything happens. Broadly, there are two extremes when it comes to something you can buy. At one end are Transactional products – simple and easy to compare. At the other end are Consultative products, a thing that you might not even realise you need but know you do when someone sits down and works through things with you.

Think of the last time you wanted to buy a book. A book is a good example of a transactional product. It’s the same product whether you buy it in a bookstore like Waterstones or a platform like Amazon. You don’t need someone to persuade you to pick one copy of the book over another. You can go off a recommendation, read a review and pick the place that is most convenient or cheap to get the book. You might even pay more in order to support your local bookstore. And the end, however, it’s a transaction and you simply exchange money for the book and get on with your life.

On the other hand, perhaps you’ve done a construction project, like a home extension. You didn’t just go out and buy and off the shelf extension. Instead, you talked to a few architects, selected one you liked, worked through a number of options, asked them for their opinion, looked at drawings and visualizations and eventually made up your mind. You couldn’t have done all that just by yourself – your architect was your consultant and advisor through the process and helped you make decisions by giving you the benefit of his or her information and expertise. This was a consultative sell.

Decades ago, before the Internet, things didn’t work quite like this. If you wanted a book, you walked into the local store and browsed the racks. Perhaps you spoke to the person behind the counter and asked for recommendations. You might have looked through the paper and read reviews of must-read books for this summer. In fact, there probably weren’t too many times you didn’t have to go into a store and ask someone’s advice, whether you were buying a new set of forks or a new car. The number of transactional sales were quite low then.

When you were in the store, you might be quite happy to pay a bit more if the service was good or if the next available store was several miles away. You’d pay for service, whether you were having your tyres changed or selecting furniture. You wouldn’t have known the options anyway – perhaps you went round three or four shops – but there was no guarantee that you couldn’t find the same thing at 20% off a few miles further on.

In this environment, the job of a salesperson was to help customers pick something. Many of the traditional selling approaches worked on the basis that the salesperson knew more than the customer and was going to spend their time together passing on their knowledge, working to “close” at the end. And that approach worked for a long time.

Then the Internet came along and changed everything. In less than ten years, many products became entirely transactional. Think of all the things you can buy online now without talking to a single person, from pencils and book and shaving cream to cars and televisions and insurance. All you have to do is do some research, compare your options and choose a product. If you know what you want, or are willing to find out by doing some research, you can then simply go on the best platform and buy it.

This has meant that that traditional rump in the middle – where you could go into a store and pay a little bit more for a little more advice has started to disappear. The relentless onslaught of the Internet is making product after product, market after market, more and more transactional. The traditional salesperson’s role is disappearing and being replaced by an online order form.

How about when you don’t know what you want? That’s the other end of the scale and it’s flourishing as well. In situations where you don’t have the expertise to evaluate your options yourself then you need some help. The individuals and organisations that do well here have the ability to help you when you don’t quite know what you need help with. For example, you might have an ache in your forearm, but you need the help of a doctor to tell whether it’s a simple muscle strain or the onset of rheumatism. If you need to carry out a major business transformation you might need to hire experienced consultants who can work with you to create and drive a process that works for your business. That needs a consultative approach.

All this means that different sales skills are needed for transactional and consultative selling. Transactional selling means you have to be great at optimising, at squeezing every last bit out of your systems and workflow and operations. Consultative selling means you have to be good with people, working with them, listening and coming up with creative and useful ideas and approaches. If what you do is repetitive and simple, it will be automated and become transactional. If what you do is human and creative, you’ve got some time still.

The first thing you have to do is figure out where you are and what you need to learn to sell in your business. You have to specialise in one end or the other – either be the best transactional salesperson out there or the best consultative. If you’re in the middle, you’re going to be squeezed out of business.

In this series of posts, I’ll start with consultative selling and then move onto transactional selling later – perhaps in another book.

As a reminder, this set of posts is part of a series that I’m planning on eventually collecting into a book. If you are reading this and are interested in this topic, please let me have any feedback, good or bad, so I can make this as useful and easy to read for you as possible.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Why Should We All Learn How To Sell?

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Sunday, 7.32pm.

Sheffield, U.K.

It’s time to try a little experiment.

I started writing this blog a little over a year ago. I didn’t really have a plan. More just a vague feeling that I wanted to write and the way to write was to get started and write.

It also took some time to figure out what I wanted to write about. Was it long detailed technical pieces about my field? Was it a short braindump every day? What form and structure and tone would be appropriate?

Well, actually, I didn’t figure any of it out. The process of writing every day meant that all those things simply emerged. And they are still emerging and developing so I’m not really sure where they will end up eventually.

There are some patterns, however, that keep repeating.

All my posts, the last few hundred anyway, start with an idea, which I draw. It might be a concept diagram, a rich picture, a graphic organiser.

They aren’t really sketchnotes – some of my early posts are – but a sketchnote is full of elements, complicated and beautiful but also hard to digest unless you’ve done it yourself.

Then, the words simply fall out of the graphic. The process of drawing the idea makes the writing much easier.

Now, after nearly 200,000 words posted (199,095 to be precise) it feels like it’s time to try something new.

Robert Pirsig, writing in Lila, says that he writes things down on little slips of paper to get them out of his mind. The act of writing down means that his mind is free to let go of those ideas. That letting go is important if you want to let new ideas in, like pouring away old tea in a cup if you want to get any more in.

That’s what this blog has felt like for the last year. A place to collect all the ideas and thoughts and things that I’ve come across that seem interesting or thought provoking or worth knowing.

Perhaps it’s time to get a little more focused.

It’s coming up to the last quarter of the year. For many of us that means looking ahead to 2019 and making plans for what we’re going to do. And a big part of that plan involves thinking about sales.

Whether you work in a company as a salesperson, run a profit centre, are expected to make rain, work as a freelancer or consultant on your own or are looking for a new job, knowing how to sell is an essential part of your role.

I’m talking about selling as one of the things you do. Not something that happens at head office in a different department. No. It starts with you. You’re at the centre of this picture that I’m looking at.

So, when you think about what selling involves, some things start to push themselves forward. There’s your customer, of course. Their business. How they make decisions. Then there is your business and your product. There’s your business and the team and network around you. Then there is your story – the story you’re going to tell to create a relationship with that customer. And then there’s the market – that big thing that acts as the backdrop to everything you do.

Many people have written about this. From academic textbooks to pop psychology, from ra-ra look at me books to biographies and how-to manuals, there’s lots out there to read and think about. So, why is it worth writing anything else about it?

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by stories of success – how someone use a particular approach to get where they are now. There’s the promise of a blueprint – do what I did and you’ll get the same results. Or there’s the fear that you’re so far behind that there’s no point in trying because you’ll never catch up.

The thing is that all these stories and ideas and concepts and blueprint are models. They describe a particular view of reality, not reality itself. They certainly don’t describe your reality, and my reality. So, it seems to me that it’s worth looking at a wide range of models and picking the ones that help us understand where we are better.

And so that’s the point of this experiment.

Over the next 30-90 days, I’m going to meander through the sales function. I’m going to try and pull together models that help explore the picture that has you and your customer at the centre. And my hope is that these models will help you and me question where we are when it comes to doing sales, and take action to improve how we do it.

What I’m also hoping is that what emerges from these posts is something of a first draft of something that will eventually become a book. Like Pirsig did with Lila. An emergent text rather than one that tries to sell a particular point of view. The kind of book I’d like to read to work out what I should be doing.

Let’s hope it works out.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Do You Need To Do To Get Extreme Success?

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Saturday, 9.44pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Charlie Munger, the Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, is well known for his views on the importance of mental models – concept that you can use to explain and understand why things happen the way they do.

Take extreme success, for example.

What is it that makes Walmart or Google so successful? And are these principles that can be used for smaller firms or even for ourselves as individuals?

Munger says extreme success is likely to happen when key factors combine in certain ways.

A. One or two factors – taken to extremes

When you think Walmart, you probably think cost. When you think Google, you think search.

These companies have taken a leadership position in a particular space – in their industry and in our minds.

If you want a prestige car, you’re going to think BMW and Mercedes first. Then there are the others.

Now, perhaps one doesn’t think of extreme success in the context of a local convenience store, but the factor that keeps them going is that they’re open late. Later than most others anyway.

So they thrive in their small niche, extremely successful in their own way.

B. Combining factors to get exponential results – the lollapalooza effect

This is the idea that 1 + 1 + 1 = 30, not 3.

Toyota have an ad out at the moment, showing a Hilux behind a glass panel and with the words in case of apocalypse, break glass.

You could argue that a Hilux gives you the ability to go anywhere and survive, has functionality that is world-class but is still something you can fix on the side of the road and is priced like a Toyota and not a Hummer.

It’s like the old joke comparing Land Rovers and Land Cruisers. If you want to go into the Australian outback, take a Land Rover. If you want to come back, take a Land Cruiser.

Scott Adams says that when he combined average skills at writing, drawing and knowledge of engineering the resulting comic, Dilbert, struck a chord with millions and took off.

It’s the combination that did it, not just any one factor.

C. Great performance over a number of factors

So here you need to look at organisations that get a lot of things right – and that’s not easy.

The more things you have to do, the more things that can go wrong.

Take Amazon, for example. It’s a company that does a ridiculous number of things – from providing a platform where you can buy almost anything to the support structures around your purchase, like recommendations and next day delivery.

Or take one of those survival watches. If you get one of them, you need to be confident that it will survive a plunge into freezing water, keep a signal going that can be picked up by satellite and looks good enough so you can wear it to an expensive fundraiser.

It’s hard to do a lot of things right. When you do, you’re going to get far.

D. Ride a wave

The final factor is that you’re lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Bill Gates was in the right place when IBM kickstarted the personal computer industry. Google came out with search algorithms just as the web reached the point where Yahoo’s listings couldn’t keep pace with the growth in pages.

The waves might be large, macroeconomic ones like the transition to renewable generation or the invention of the shipping container.

Or they might be small ones, like coming out with a diet that catches the eye of an influencer and spreads.

The thing with waves is that it’s hard to predict when they will turn up. You just need to get in position and, if you’re lucky, one will come along and lift you up.

So, do these apply to small businesses and individuals?

Well… as a model, perhaps we can use them and see. As George Box wrote all models are wrong, some are useful.

For example, can you be a leader in a particular factor? Cost, for example. While all your competitors do things manually, can you automate stuff so that you can be cheaper, but offer much more?

Can you put things together so that they have an exponential effect. For example, it’s incredibly hard to recruit people who can read, write and do arithmetic (to a high standard!). If you can… then there are many consulting jobs waiting for you with high salaries.

Are you a superb generalist – someone who can walk into an industry and fix everything from sales to operations to R&D. If so, perhaps that’s your edge.

And finally – have you qualified in a field whose time has come? Neuroscience, perhaps? Or big data?

What’s perhaps clear is that if you want to succeed, it’s not just about working hard.

You also need to know why you have an edge.

And then work on the things that sharpen your edge.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How Do You Find Out What People Really Want?

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Friday, 10.24pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this whole idea of having goals and going after them.

I was listening to a podcast where the person being interviewed said that the purpose of their company was to help people do something on Instagram intentionally.

Then there’s the news story about Big Brother in the UK – and how the first few seasons of the show were about real people – an authentic portrayal – and then as the series went on it got more and more artificial, with the participants doing what they were expected to do for the camera.

I’m not a big fan of selling. No one really is, I think.

But it’s easy to think that’s what we have to do, that’s how the world works. We have something of value to offer. You have money. And my sales job is to help you exchange your money for my value.

And then I started reading a book about design patterns in user interface design.

It says if you want someone to use a tool you create, then you’re going to have to understand them first.

No one uses a tool because they want to use a tool.

Take a spade, for example. You’ll pick up a spade because you want to get your garden sorted. You want to get your garden sorted so you’ll have somewhere relaxing to sit during the summer with a cool drink.

You’re using the space because you really want to put your feet up and relax.

And this is something we all need to spend some time thinking about.

Let’s say you’re starting a management consultancy that is going to do some clever data analysis.

So, you can crunch data and create pretty pictures and send them to your customer daily.

Is that what she wants? To print off all your charts and cover her walls with them?

Or is she in charge of procurement and is responsible for cutting costs – and she only looks good to her boss if she cuts costs year on year.

So is your analysis going to help her reach that goal of cutting costs or, more importantly, warn her when she’s in danger of actually letting costs go up?

So, going back to the pattern book, we need to put our customers under a microscope.

We need to figure out what their real goals are. What’s their equivalent of cheese that will get them sniffing the air?

We need to think about how they will go about things. Can they make decisions right now? Does everything need to be in a budget first? What route will they take?

How do they talk about what they want? There’s not much point talking about vitreous structures of patent fragility when they think in terms of glass houses.

How familiar are they will what you do? Do you need to spend a lot of time educating them, or will it be obvious how you can help them?

What do they think about what you do? For example, I once called someone who managed a metals warehouse about commodity prices and got a long lecture on how they did nothing with markets and that was only for fancy chaps that drove Ferraris in London.

Even though the warehouse manager was sat on inventory of several million that went up and down in value all the time.

This is why scattergun or spray and pray approaches don’t really work.

You can’t really sell someone. Not for the long term anyway.

They have to make their own minds up about what you offer. The challenge for you is getting in position so they can see you when they’re ready.

It’s all about being discoverable.

And perhaps the best way to do that is to get out there and start talking to people. Not to sell them, but to understand them better.

Then, if they need you, they’ll know where to find you.

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Making Sense Of It All – Is It Even Possible?

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Thursday, 9.21pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Have you ever noticed that when you sit at your table and look at your glass – I mean really look at it – it turns out that it isn’t there at all?

Of course you haven’t, because glasses don’t act that way.

Electrons do.

You’ve probably heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It’s the idea that you can’t tell where something is and how fast it’s moving at the same time.

With an electron, if you try and look for it – that action will give it some energy, a boost, and it will end up speeding somewhere else. If you get its speed right, it will now be in a new place.

So you end up with this idea that an electron is everywhere at the same time, a sort of cloud rather than something precise.

And this is seems like a passable metaphor for society if we want to make sense of it all.

So we start with a flux of events and ideas, the braided rope of everyday life.

How do we make sense of what’s going on?

Take an approach that Meryl Louis set out in 1980.

She says that we the events we experience result in us making conscious and unconscious assumptions and anticipations.

What these let us do is make predictions.

Then… we experience events as they happen, as they unfold with time.

Some of them turn out like we predicted – but sometimes they don’t. We’re surprised.

That results in us needing to come up with an explanation – something that in turn helps us interpret and attribute meaning to the surprise we’ve just had.

Something that helps us make sense of it all.

So far so obvious – what’s the point of this all?

Well, one point is kind of screamingly obvious. All this happens in our minds. The actual flux of events and ideas doesn’t really care about any of this.

The second is that sense making is closely linked to surprise. We need to be jolted out of the everyday to see and discover something new.

Let’s say you do the same thing every day. You go to work, drive the same route, sit at the same desk, follow the same routine. How likely is it that you’ll experience something different?

Probably quite low.

It’s nice to have a simple life – one with routines. But if you’ve got too much of that, you need to get restless, a little worried, a little angsty about it all.

It’s very easy to assume that what you do is not very good, no one else will hire you, you’re not very marketable or sociable or attractive.

And if you’re in an environment (which you’ve constructed by the way with the decisions you’ve made over time) where your predictions about how things will happen come true all the time – then you’ve created a version of meaning, of sense as a result.

This can happen to individuals, to organisations, to families.

The antidote to the everyday is to get some surprise into your life.

And the thing is you don’t know where that will come from – you just need to create the opportunity for more surprises to enter your life, surprises that force you to re-examine your existing ideas and come up with new ones, ones that have a different kind of meaning.

Perhaps this needs an example. Perhaps not.

Here’s one. The fallacy of centrality.

This is the assumption that if something is important, then you’d know about it. And you don’t, so it’s not.

That leads to all kinds of problems.

Have you ever experienced a situation where someone new came in, promising to sort everything out. You put forward an idea for something that would make things better, but that person ignores you. They’ve never heard of this approach, so it clearly can’t work.

Except they then fail – and your approach works.

The problem is that the way in which they made sense of things failed when they experienced the events you did as well. Perhaps they were surprised, perhaps they learned from it. Perhaps not.

What this means for us is that the world is complex. For us to make sense of it all, we need to be alert to surprises, because that’s how we learn.

And if you’re not being surprised enough, you need to change something. Now.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Why Succeeding Is More About Defeating Ourselves Than Others

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Wednesday, 9.04pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I was listening to Amy Porterfield’s podcast today and her guest, Brooke Castillo, said that the first time you do a webinar “your body literally thinks something is about to attack you and that you can die”.

Which made a picture jump into my mind – one that stayed there.

As human beings, we avoid pain. The pain of failure, the pain of rejection – any kind of pain.

In fact, we’re so fearful of pain that it can make us put things off – avoid doing things that will end up being good for us.

It’s a well known fact that we hate losing much more than we like winning. The ratio is something like five to one.

And this is a problem when we try and do anything new or different or better.

You know the old saying – if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich?

The problem, perhaps, is that if you’re smart enough to know all the ways in which things can go wrong, then you’ve got much more to be afraid of.

You create a monster in your mind, a monster that represents what failure looks like. Then, that monster sits in your way and stops you from doing things that you need to do.

And the problem is that this is a physical barrier, not just a mental one. Your body senses your brain’s fear and creates a mix of chemicals that physically cause you to want to run and hide.

To do anything but that horrible task of reaching out and making a cold call or connecting with someone new.

So, what are you going to do. What should one do when faced with a monster in one’s own mind.

Perhaps one could start with looking.

Many years ago, I was taught how to solve problems in engineering. I found analog circuit design hard, and a particular problem just wasn’t making sense to me.

My lecturer at the time just said look at the problem. Just look at it.

And so that’s what I did. For around three days.

All I did was look and think and look and think. And look and think about it. And think about what I could do about it.

And then suddenly, after three days, it felt like a rock had moved, something had shifted and suddenly I could see my way to an answer.

I can’t remember any circuit design now… but I do remember that feeling of being able to push through the fog and discomfort of a problem simply by staying put and looking at it.

And I think perhaps that’s how we can deal with monsters.

Because really, we only have a few choices open to us.

We can turn and walk away.

We can try and go around them… but we’ll probably find that they just move into the path we’re taking or we find new ones in our way.

Or we have a staredown. If we stand their long enough, they’ll get up, shake their heads and walk away.

Perhaps really that’s how we succeed.

Not by being the smartest or the wealthiest or the best connected.

Just by being the one that doesn’t back down.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Why Do Some People Have All The Power?

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Tuesday, 6.54pm

Sheffield, U.K.

It’s easy to assume the world is the way it is and that’s how it’s going to stay.

It’s hard to imagine an alternative to the status quo. Can you imagine Google and Facebook not being as big and powerful as they are now? Doing a search on any other engine?

Logically – it’s possible, even likely. Societies change, regimes fall and companies disappear. All the time.

But, when you’re in the middle of a situation, whether personal, business or political, it’s hard to see where the change is going to come from.

Which is where power theory may help.

This paper by Oliver E. Williamson says that you need to have three things to grab power in an organisation:

  1. You need to control critical resources.
  2. You need to have early access to information.
  3. You need to be strategically positioned to deal with uncertainty.

Technically – he argues that the most critical part of the organisation will get these assigned to them. So, for example, if marketing is the bit of the organisation that makes the most difference, then it will be given these three things to do.

He also says that power theory is not great at explaining things – it’s a bit of a pied piper – because if you have control, why would you give it up? Why wouldn’t you stop power being taken away from you?

Now… I’m not sure I agree with his dismissal of the concept, because it seems to be useful in explaining both how things are and how they might change. Bear with me.

Let’s say you run a big car company in the US in fifties and sixties. The rest of the world has been devastated by war but the mainland US is unaffected and starts to churn out stuff for the rest of the world, supported by natural resources, a big population and abundant industrial expertise.

You’re in control. You make plenty of money. People buy your cars all around the world. Gas is cheap, so your cars are big and comfortable. You’ve got plenty of political support because of all the people you employ and the politicians you support.

You’ve also got all the statisticians and data analysts and government reports you need to see about the industry. Plenty of information on sales and resources and competitors. Nothing really gets past you.

You have a perfect power triangle – you’re in the strongest shape of your life – and it looks like nothing can ever challenge your dominance.

Until it does.

The Japanese car producers, who you’ve dismissed as makers of small, cheap, tinny cars that the American public will never buy, start to make better cars.

More importantly, however, there is a oil crisis. The Middle East creates a cartel and sends prices sky high. And suddenly all your big cars are hugely expensive to run, you don’t know how to make small economical cars and the Japanese have an opening – and people start to try their cars and like them.

Your problem is that you weren’t strategically positioned to deal with this kind of uncertainty.

And that’s because it’s really hard to predict such a dramatic shift in circumstances, especially when things are going so well.

Let’s take another example.

Microsoft was unchallenged in the PC operating system world. It ran most machines. The rest hardly made an impact.

The thing that they weren’t strategically positioned for was the Internet – and that let Google in.

What this shows us is that power is temporary – it’s a function of control, information and positioning.

At a point in time.

There’s no point in controlling critical resources if they become irrelevant. Just ask the coal industry as it wilts in the face of renewables.

There’s no point in having early access to information, for example through leaks from the government, when the Internet doesn’t give a hoot what politicians think and lets anyone talk to anyone else in the world.

And there’s no point being positioned behind a big wall if there’s a big tunnel forming right under it.

However fixed something seems to be, however powerful the current people in charge appear to be, there’s another power structure forming behind them, invisible to them – but getting ready to replace them.

Let’s hope it’s a better one.

Cheers,

Karthik