Category: Sales

Friday, 7.46pm

Sheffield, U.K.

We are the only species on Earth that observe “Shark Week”. Sharks don’t even observe “Shark Week”, but we do. For the same reason I can pick this pencil, tell you its name is Steve and go like this (breaks pencil) and part of you dies just a little bit on the inside, because people can connect with anything. We can sympathize with a pencil, we can forgive a shark, and we can give Ben Affleck an academy award for Screenwriting. – Jeff Winger in Community

A few things haven’t gone the way I would have liked today.

I don’t usually worry much about things not going right – but when they don’t it’s still stings a little.

It will pass – it always does.

But, it gets me thinking about a few things – but I don’t know if the pieces will come together in any coherent way.

But let us have a go.

We start with a book called Bureaucracy: What government organisations do and why they do it by James Q. Wilson.

Wilson makes an unpromising start by quoting James G. March and Herbert A. Simon as writing that “not a great deal has been said about organizations, but it has been said over and over in a variety of languages.”

Theory, this implies, is a waste of time but it is unlikely to be of any practical use.

Well – that’s it for this blog then.

Luckily, there is more, and it is useful.

First, there is a distillation of concepts one can use to understand bureaucracies – and organisations in general.

Ask yourself what tasks the organisation does – not goals, but the critical tasks it must carry out.

Then ask what gives the organisation its sense of mission – is it pride in what people do, a religious calling, a sense of honour and duty?

And then ask how autonomous the organisation is – how well it can make decisions.

Then, if we skip to the end Wilson quotes James Colvard on how to run organisations better – have “a bias towards action, small staffs, and a high level of delegation based on trust.”

And here we get to a central point – management is not about tools and it is not about systems.

It is about delivering something – a mission – what a customer needs – something that makes things better.

From this, we can jump to Federalist Paper No. 51 which has some hope for people wondering what is happening in the world right now – especially when it comes to people and governments.

James Madison argues, in his paper that:

“The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

In other words you need institutions – independent centres of power that balance and check each other to maintain freedom and democracy in a society.

And you need the same in an organisation – excessive centralisation leads to ossification, excessive decentralisation leads to dissipation – and you need a balance of loose and tight to keep the system together.

So, what about the broken pencil?

The point, I suppose, is that organisations act in ways that don’t always make sense.

What wins in one situation loses in another – and we often make the mistake of thinking that it’s the systems and processes that are the organisation rather than the people.

But the people are also the system.

As humans we can connect to anything – we can take a bunch of shapes, add facial features and emotions and give them personalities and feel like we relate to them in some way.

And as humans we are impossibly complex.

Something that seems right to one person is completely wrong to another.

When I fail, it is often less because what I did was a failure but because what I did was wrong in the eyes of others.

Or maybe it was just wrong – it’s hard to tell.

But the thing is to keep going – because what else is there to do?

We have the ability, it seems, to project human nature onto everything around us.

When we understand our own – then perhaps we will find the right place for us.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 7.34pm

Sheffield, U.K.

They say the secret of success is being at the right place at the right time, but since you never know when the right time is going to be, I figure the trick is to find the right place and just hang around.” – Bill Waterson

It’s not often when some of my favourite concepts find themselves travelling towards each other and, unlike physical objects that find it hard to occupy the same space at the same time, combine to create something greater – something more lasting.

Let me explain.

If you are familiar with Bill Waterson’s cartoons of Calvin and Hobbes – the boy with the tiger – you may remember that he once invented a transmogrifier – something that would change you into something else.

Later, he modified the transmogrifier, turning it on its side creating a duplicator – where you could make copies of anything.

The one in the image above is the perfected version…

A duplicator, coincidentally, is the subject of a story that Neil Gaiman remembers in his book The view from the cheap seats – a story that changed how he looked at things.

And it has to do with theft.

When someone steals from you they take something you have, something you can’t get back.

Like your watch or some gold or a car.

But when you steal music or a book or a movie, Gaiman points out, it’s something different – what you’re doing is using a duplicator – making a copy.

In doing that the original hasn’t been taken, but an exact copy has.

What this means for creators is that the value of stuff that can be duplicated is going to go down.

If you create a song now you sell it for less than a dollar.

Books are cheap – not many people can get away with selling books that have a three figure price tag.

The entire industry that goes into policing intellectual property – making sure that copies are not passed around may keep prices high but reduces value as well due to the cost of policing.

In this new world the things that will hold and gain in value are the things that cannot be reproduced.

Gaiman suggests these are things like live shows and personal contact.

And we’re all probably finding that to be the case – which is why events and get-togethers are one of the fastest growing segments of society and activity.

Gaiman then talks about his friend Cory Doctorow who has an analogy about mammals and dandelions that starts to explain this changing world.

Mammals invest a huge amount of time protecting and nurturing their young.

Dandelions let their seeds drift away with the wind and don’t worry about which ones make it or not.

People who treat their intellectual property like mammals treat their young – protective and nurturing to ensure their profits will find the whole thing pretty hard going and pretty depressing.

The thing for creators now is to create – that’s the first thing.

As the quote that starts this post suggests find something you like doing and then go about doing it.

Don’t worry about profits and protection and property – such things are from the old days.

Just create and set your creations free to drift with the wind – fly along the Internet.

And find things to do to help you make a living that are hard to duplicate – consulting, events, support, maintenance – the kinds of things that will pay for food and shelter and some luxuries.

Because the thing is you might find that the duplicator works for you and the things you do that are hard to duplicate work for you.

The only question is when?

Until then, hang around creating stuff you enjoy making.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.19pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad. – Howard Luck Gossage

Like most of you, I suspect, I’ve tried writing a blog at various points – and most of them fell by the wayside.

I drew the picture above for one of these attempts in April 2016 to talk about The Man in the Chair.

In 1958 McGraw-Hill, a publisher of business titles, came up with an ad – The Man in the Chair – which then ran for the next three or four decades.

The point of the ad was that a buyer knows almost nothing about you when they first become aware of you – so why do you think they should buy from you?

Now, you probably don’t think that – but it’s a lesson many of us learn over time, often too late.

For example, when you send off your CV for a job do you assume that everything the reviewer needs to know is in there?

Do you not mention something when you’re talking to someone because you assume they must already know?

Most people are much less informed about you, your product or your service than you might think.

I was browsing through Great advertising campaigns by Nicholas Ind, and he points out in the book that it’s easy for those involved with a brand – those who spend much of their time thinking and working and trying to figure out how to tell others about their brand – to assume that it’s just as important to the consumer.

In reality, it’s probably inconsequential – or at least nowhere near as important as you think it might be.

For example in the utility industries – those dealing with electricity, gas, water and telecoms – there is a huge amount of complexity.

There is regulation, change, investment, billing – all kinds of arcane things that keep people employed.

Most consumers, however, are interested in two things at most.

Do they have to do something – are they obliged to comply?

What does it mean for their budgets?

Other than that they want you to sort out all the complexity.

So, at the sharp end, the bit that points at the consumer you need a very simple message.

In the book Nicholas tells you about Absolut Vodka – how Geoff Hayes, an Art Director, came up with the idea of showing the vodka bottle with words like “It’s absolutely perfect.”

His writer pointed out that you could trim that to “Absolut Perfection.”

Two words – and it captures something.

But, the book points out, is that the reason the team thought they had something was because from those two words they had ten ideas for how to present things – which is what made it a campaign.

It takes time to get a sense of what something is – what it means.

And even if that something is you – you might find that it takes time to figure that out – and it takes time to figure out what your business is all about.

And it’s probably worth remembering that if it takes us so long to work it out – it must be even harder for someone else.

The mistake we make is trying to sell – to close – too early in the process.

What we really need to learn when trying to advertise is that, as the McGraw-Hill ad says, “sales start before your salesman calls.”

So design your advertising to help your customer get to know you in a way that works for them.

And then the sales seem to just happen.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 8.31pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Professional services industries like finance, consulting, and legal services are, by definition, meta-industries. That is, they serve to help large companies raise money, buy and sell each other, reorganize, implement new systems, conduct complex transactions, and so forth. – Andrew Yang

I’ve been thinking about the service sector and how to market it for the last few days.

Which is why the book How to advertise by Kenneth Roman and Jane Maas caught my eye.

Published in 1976, it’s a short book and the two authors worked at Ogilvy and Mather.

The book is a quick read and effectively a bunch of rules – but there are a few interesting things that still resonate with us now.

First – what does it take to be a good advertiser?

The answer, according to the authors is hard work, knowing the rules and creative brilliance.

When you start thinking of marketing your product the first thing you need is to understand how you are going to position your product

Where is it going to sit in the mind of the consumer?

That positioning decision sets your strategy – one part of which is the creative bit – the actual advertising.

And the book lists five questions it’s worth asking about your creative strategy.

1. The Objective: What should the advertising do?
2. The Audience: Who is your target consumer?
3. Key Consumer Benefit: Why should they buy from you?
4. Support: A reason to believe in that benefit
5. Tone and Manner: What is the product’s “personality”?

Getting the strategy right needs work – you need to do your research, understand the facts, really get a good picture of what is going on so that the strategy you come up with is grounded in the data.

This paper, for example, sets out how I go about doing this.

And then they say something in the book that really fits how I see things working.

Getting the strategy done is half the work. The other half is the advertising itself – the execution.

Now, if you look back at the points above you’ll have a very quick overview of what you need to do delivering any kind of professional service.

Whether you’re an accountant, lawyer or management consultant the first part of your work is all about coming up with the right strategy.

The second part is executing – delivering on that strategy.

But why should someone trust you enough to hire you?

And that’s summed up in one tiny paragraph on page 149 – something that I think could easily be expanded into a whole paper or book all by itself – a message that’s laid out in the image that starts this post.

“Look for a business philosophy, stable management, a professional staff, technical expertise, and a past, present and future.”

Read that again and tell me it isn’t one of the most elegant and densely packed sentences you’ve seen.

And then tell me if you can honestly say that your agency ticks every one of those criteria?

And if it doesn’t – isn’t it obvious what you need to do?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 8.59pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Acting is not an important job in the scheme of things. Plumbing is. – Spencer Tracy

It is not always clear what kind of relationship exists between the work one does and what one is paid.

I have a book upstairs about the wealth distribution in the UK and while I haven’t read it in a while, some of the points it makes are probably still relevant.

For example, a quarter of the fortunes made in this country are in property and another quarter in finance.

The change from a nationalised set of industries to deregulation and free enterprise created a host of well paid jobs – what the book calls “fat cat” jobs.

These are the ones heading major enterprises, industries, institutions that came out of public ownership and went into the private sector.

The way one decides how to pay people that run these organisations is by hiring advisers who look at what other organisations pay and suggest an equivalent salary – something that results in a ratcheting up of salaries.

Then there are the people in the professions – what the book calls the “professional poor”.

They’re several rungs down on the wealth scale.

Now, while we’d all like to be fat cats one needs to be careful about labels.

Arguably, one of the most important inventions of modern times is the invention of the joint stock company.

This is where people who don’t know each other put in money for a share in an enterprise and of its profits.

This replaced entrenched interests, family concerns and cartels with an institution – something that was its own legal entity and that was served by its Board of Directors.

So, in that situation you would expect them to be competent and pay them accordingly.

But say you aren’t at that level yet – you don’t have a business that’s listed on an exchange – you’re just starting out with something new.

What do you need to have at the core of your business?

Well, the single best thing is to have a monopoly – be in a business where the barriers to entry are so high that you have no competition.

If you can’t swing that then make sure that at the core of your business you fix something that’s broken.

Let me explain.

Lots of people will help you make money. Play the markets. Find you investments. Save you cash. Get you compensation.

Few, however, really fix problems.

Take the job of a plumber, for example.

Most of the time you don’t really think about your plumbing at home – it works and there is hot water and something to drink.

But what happens when something goes wrong?

You’re willing to pay almost anything to get it fixed.

And that’s the point – you’re always more willing to pay money to fix a broken thing than pay money to avoid costs or make more money.

We’re very cautious – we don’t like to spend money if we’re not sure and we’re worried about losing money betting on the wrong thing.

In fact, we’re much more likely to hate the idea of losing money than the idea of making lots from a bet.

But when something is wrong – we’re a customer.

People look for you not because you’re nice or because you can help them – but because you can fix a smelly, dirty problem for them.

That’s the second best driver to bring in business – after being the only game in town.

Imagine listening to two pitches.

One says here’s a great way for you to make loads of money – you just need to hire me and I will do amazing things for you.

The other says you’ve got a smelly, dirty, messy problem in your house and your carpets are going mouldy – and I can fix that for you.

Which one are you going to hire first?

Cheers.

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.30pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon. Winston Churchill

Every once in a while you talk to a “real” business person and realise that they think in a different way about things.

Some of it is about culture and some of it is about history – but all of it is hard to compress into a formula.

Take, for example, a collection of essays titled The culture of entrepreneurship edited by Brigitte Berger.

The essays explore the way in which entrepreneurs operate around the world and argues for a better understanding of their importance.

This is important because, as the introduction points out, the living standards we enjoy are as a result of the productive forces unleashed by capitalism and embodied by entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs find ways to make the world work better – and in doing so seem to improve things for everyone else.

And that’s something many people still find hard to understand – they cling to the idea that people in business exist to exploit others – and that business itself must therefore be evil.

And that really comes from a place of fear – from a place of misunderstanding.

Imagine that a business is a creature – a strange thing with many arms and heads and a weird body.

Most people would be wary of such a strange animal – wondering what it’s going to do to them.

But that creature has probably evolved to fit a particular niche – and it is eminently suited to do what it is supposed to do.

That business can exist, grow, thrive until one of two things happens.

First, it can grow old and weak – and be devoured by something else.

Or its world can change around it and the niche it occupies disappear, leaving it defenceless and unprotected – and it simply goes extinct.

That’s just the way these things go.

But, while the business is alive – or even when it’s just a thought in the mind of an entrepreneur what is the most important thing that must be in place?

For this – we should think of one of the characteristics of a system as described by Russ Ackoff.

He said that you cannot explain a “why” in terms of its parts. A system cannot understand itself.

In a business you have many people doing jobs – think of them occupied in moving arms and legs – account and marketing and so on.

If you asked any one of them why the business exists you will probably get a partial point of view – perhaps articulated using the language and customs of the respondent’s profession.

In simpler terms they will tell you “how” the business works.

This is the business of analysis.

In order to know “why” the system works you must talk to the entrepreneur – the person who is outside the system – the person who is engaged in creating the business.

That is the only person that can tell you “why” the business exists because they were driven to create it.

This distinction is not easy to capture.

Does it mean knowing how to do every aspect of the business?

No – but it does mean knowing what each aspect needs to do – and making sure that’s done.

Within this basic structure there are a huge range of possibilities for how the entrepreneur functions.

Some people have grown up in business families while others have come to it with no background at all.

Some people see their businesses as families while others see theirs as a network of professionals held together by common values and desires.

The fact is that if you’re an entrepreneur the most important thing you have to be able to do is to see the creature you’re creating.

If you can’t then you’re going to struggle.

And it may be easier to stick with the day job.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 7.16pm

Sheffield, U.K.

While humans tend to be conservative, sticking with what they like, children are utterly conservative: they want things as they were last week, which is the way the world has always been. – Neil Gaiman

Ideas and concepts live in many places and it is time to turn back to TED for some inspiration.

Inspiration like this talk by George Whitesides, Professor of Chemistry.

Professor Whitesides tells us that while a lot of work goes into looking at complexity very little is done on simplicity.

Which is interesting – you can write papers and get very excited about complex things – but simple things are hard.

They’re hard because you can’t get away with fuzzy thinking – it’s simple to see when something is wrong.

Now, I was wondering about this in the context of innovation.

We often think that innovation is about something dramatically different, something entirely new, something radical.

But there it is often hard to tell whether something is new and wonderful or whether it is crazy and outlandish.

Which is why the quote that starts this post by Neil Gaiman is worth keeping in mind.

Imagine having to sell your child on the idea of vegetables.

There’s something hardwired in children to believe that brightly coloured thing are evil – vibrant greens and red are poisonous.

It probably has a perfectly sensible evolutionary history to it.

Kids are often quite happy eating the same thing over and over again, the same cereals, the same porridge and fruit combinations.

Try and surprise them with a vegetable curry for breakfast and see what happens.

The point really is that people don’t trust change, don’t trust your fancy new fangled ideas and really want you to just go away.

So, what should you do?

Well, you could ignore everyone and create the next generation of incredibly complex and world changing software and hardware technology.

As long as you realise that the odds of success are stacked against you.

But, if you follow Whiteside’s advice, you need to ask yourself if what you do has four characteristics.

First, is it reliable – can you predict what it’s going to do most of the time?

If something works then that’s a good start.

Next, is it cheap?

If something is cheap, Whitesides says, someone will find a use for it.

Then, do you get a lot of value for the cost – is it something that is actually very useful?

And finally is it a building block – can you stack it to make things?

Now, the image that comes to mind – the simplest, cheapest thing that exemplifies this is a brick – a literal brick.

It’s reliable – you know how it works.

It’s cheap.

You can stack it.

And you can build a cathedral with it.

In the world of computing the Unix philosophy is based on pretty much the same principles.

The thing is that nobody starts with something simple.

We start with a mess – and in our first attempts to understand or build something we make it complicated.

And then we learn and start stripping away – refactoring and redesigning – trying to make it simpler.

But that’s easier said than done.

Often it’s easier to throw everything away and start again.

But with the benefit of the learning you’ve gained along the way.

The answer, perhaps, to why we overcomplicate things is because that’s the easy thing to do.

Ironically, it takes thought and effort to keep things simple.

And that’s what makes it more valuable to us as humans.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 4.22pm

Sheffield, U.K.

You gotta keep trying to find your niche and trying to fit into whatever slot that’s left for you or to make one of your own. – Dolly Parton

Life happens one decision at a time – and at any given day you wake up and you are where you are.

Because of those decisions you made.

One of the things I believe is that if something is well designed you don’t need to force it to do the right thing.

For example if you have a good product that the market needs then you will be able to find customers, especially in this day and age.

Of course such a statement is unprovable – and not particularly helpful.

There are many cases where very good products were ignored for a long time before they were finally adopted.

Like the clockwork radio invented by Trevor Baylis, for example.

The challenge we all face is whether we do things the way we are told or the way we want to.

For example, any job you start, any organisation you join, any club you belong to, will have goals and rules and targets.

If the contribution you make is measured in terms of these targets and they can becoming all consuming in some cases.

These goals are there for what seems like a good reason – to provide direction and motivation – but they can also change the purpose of the organisation they are meant to be helping.

But, you say, surely they are the same thing – the goals you write down must match your purpose?

Not always.

Let’s take a hospital, for example.

The purpose of a hospital is to treat sick people and make them better.

The primary purpose anyway.

Let’s say you set a target that every patient must be seen within four hours – then what happens?

People start to focus on the waiting time statistics – and they do everything to make sure it’s inside the target.

That includes sending people to different hospitals or creating an application process to be allowed to wait in the first place.

Very quickly the primary purpose of the hospital becomes the management of waiting times.

And that’s not the same thing as treating patients.

This is an admittedly simple example but it’s a fact that the purpose of organisations are often subverted without them realising.

Deming used to write of many organisations being stable systems for the production of defects, for example.

Now, the point I’m trying to make is that when you try and fit into a plan or process something is always compromised along the way.

In many cases, especially in the early days of your career it can seem like you have no choice – you do things the way the boss wants or you find another job.

You spend your time forcing yourself through square holes.

And this takes effort – complying with the rules and reports and structures and processes can be exhausting and unrewarding.

But the alternative is finding a you shaped hole to go through – and that also takes effort.

You need to find out what you’re shaped like – what’s unique about you and why you’re different and where you fit.

That takes time and experimentation and error.

But eventually, if you’re lucky, you’ll figure out what shape you are.

And then it will be easy to squeeze through a hole shaped like you.

Effortlessly.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.30pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. – Nelson Mandela

I was speaking with a friend the other day and we were talking about children and how to relate to them.

A couple of decades ago your parents, our parents, didn’t really have much training before they had children.

They worked things out through a mix of folklore and advice from those around us – advice that came from memory rather than from knowledge.

Now, you and I have no such excuses.

We live in the world of the Internet, where there is information everywhere and advice on anything, if you choose to look.

And one of the perennial problems we have is getting things to change – things that we believe are not working as they should.

Some of the earliest work in this field is by Chin and Benne who came up with three basic ways to change things in systems that involve humans – social systems.

The first way is what is called rational empirical.

This supposes that if you and I sit down and you explain all the reasons why I should change what I’m doing then I will listen to you and change my ways.

I take it you’ve had a go at that with kids at some point.

The second way is called power coercive and it has to do with using power to get your own way – forcing it through because you have authority or the ability to get what you want done.

That’s probably been something you’ve tried as well.

And these two approaches are just as widely used when it comes to organisations, societies and governments.

The rational approach assumes that if you put the science behind something in front of people they’ll make the right choices.

If you know that smoking harms your body and if the information is on the packaging then the rational thing to do is stop smoking.

Information and the dissemination of information is the way that the rational way makes things change for the better.

The equivalent of the power coercive approach is laws and regulation and policy – the things that try and set out what you should do and what will happen if you don’t comply.

So, you have rules on where you can smoke, for example.

You have laws that legislate for clean air or waste management – where you want people to literally clean up their act.

But then under the same umbrella you have opposition and protest, trying to get politicians to put forward your ideas through lobbying or using direct action to make your case.

Then you have a third way – the normative re-educative way.

This approach relies on you taking a walk, a journey with other people and examining what they think.

You try and look at things from their point of view and reflect back what you hear.

What you’re looking for is an experience where the right way emerges from the social interaction with others – where you start to listen, understand, compromise and change.

Now, all these ways can lead to change happening, although it isn’t always clear whether the change is because of the way that was used.

You have examples of this in books like Freakonomics – where a mayor might assume that the drop in crime during their tenure was because of their strict policies and investment in the numbers of police officers on the street.

It turned out, however, that the drop might have actually been because abortion was legalised and many people that might have been born into poverty and eventually become criminals were never born in the first place.

You might have heard the phrase “poor boys go to prison, poor girls get pregnant.”

So, it’s not always clear where change comes from.

This model is also old and should be used just as a starting point.

None of these ways will probably work in a real life situation if used in isolation.

In real life you probably need good reasons to do something, you need to be in a position where you can make some progress and you need to be willing to put the time into taking people along with you, and even examining some of your own thoughts along the way.

The point really is that change takes time – and learning, from others and by you.

So, if you are going to spend your life working on changing something – make it something you really care about.

Because it’s not going to be easy or quick.

And it may not happen in your lifetime.

And make sure that when it’s all pored over many years from now you’re on the right side of history.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 5.58pm

Sheffield, U.K.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world – John Le Carre (Spywriter)

Perhaps you’re a sociable sort of person – someone who goes out and meets customers regularly for a drink and a catch up.

Perhaps you like golf days and sports events and having a good time.

Personally, I’m not good at that sort of thing – which is why reading Simply better: Winning and keeping customers by delivering what matters most by Patrick Barwise and Sean Meehan is a reassuring read – and a novel one.

The unexpected message at the heart of this book is that people don’t do business with you because of the unique and special things you do but because you do the basics better and cheaper than the competition.

That is, actually, a little surprising.

And that’s because we’re all so used to hearing about the Unique Service Proposition or USP.

If you do a business plan there will be a section asking for your USP

A USP is important – but not in the way you think.

We assume that the USP is the reason the customer buys from you – they’re so overcome by the awesomeness of that one thing they can only get from you that they rush to get their money out and sign up with you.

Barwise and Meehan argue that we have this wrong in their short book.

For example, it’s important to interact with your customers.

They find that customers of successful companies and not so successful companies spend around the same amount of time interacting with customers.

The unsuccessful ones, however, spend time socialising while the successful ones get down to business and talk about how the customer is getting on with the service and product.

During execution the successful companies focus on getting the basics right – proving the category benefits that are taken as for granted by the managers in the firm.

The unsuccessful ones focus on the exiting and edgy stuff they have – while the successful companies walk away with the business by doing the core things well.

Successful companies understand what customers need and build that.

The unsuccessful ones build cool stuff and wonder why no one buys it.

Now, you may thing tagging such approaches as successes and failures is a little harsh – you could think of examples that break the rule – and you would be right.

But it’s not hard to realise that people keep buying from you because you deliver the basics they need at a price they’re willing to pay.

Being different matters before they do business with you – being distinctive and having a USP matters when you’re advertising.

It’s not the thing you build operations and execution around.

It’s a simple message really.

Be bold and creative and distinctive in the way you promote yourself.

But when it comes to execution, get the basics right before worrying about frills or extras.

Simply be better.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh