Lifelong or new?

What’s more important? Creating customer relationships that last longer than you could hope for, or building a larger customer base? There are strong arguments for both directions, and I don’t think that either of them are more important than the other. I think that the answer should be based on where your company is at the moment, not where you want to be. I think we should be more focused on building stronger relationships right now, not getting new clients. Case in point: we recently pushed a new product out that increased our user base at the target company by a very large amount. I think we should focus more on increasing user base within our current clients before we try to gather new ones. The more people within a company that use our product, the more likely we are to keep our renew contracts, potentially for more money each year.

The more free products and services we can offer, the more likely we are to garner support within our current client base, and eventually, we can build our total number of company subscriptions to our “paid-only” services.

I know we offer “products” and “services” separately. I don’t think that we really have any real products. Everything we offer is a service. Access to reports that help users get work done faster. Events where we teach our ideas and foresights. Articles that reinforce our insights.

I say this because to me, a product is a physical object that a customer can take with them and use. Yes, the user can print our a copy of a report or article, but that is a capability of the services we provide. We are moving rapidly to the digital world, but I don’t think we have a clear plan on how we should do this. I think one of the first things we can do to help clarify it to both ourselves and our customers is to drop the artificial separation of products and services we offer, and really show them as they are.

Not pandering to customer wants

To clarify my last post: I don’t mean to say that you should let your customers tell you when to do something new. I just mean that you should come up with new, interesting, bleeding edge products and services, and then offer them to customers when it seems to be the right time. But be ahead of the request. Pay close attention to what your customers are doing and produce before they ask for it.

When to stop, and when to go

In business, you’re never guaranteed to succeed. It take hard work and hard decisions go truly get ahead. I’m no economics or MBA, but I get the basic concepts. You need to know when to stop doing what is not helping, or even hurting you, even if doing so upsets a couple of your clients. Every little (and big) thing you do will please a portion of your customers. One of the big problems with this idea is that if you decide not to carry that “product” anymore, you will upset part of your customer base.

The key to this is that if you are good enough all around, if the core of what you do is good enough, that in the big scheme of things, it won’t matter. Trader Joe’s is a good example. I don’t fully understand their way of managing product count or what they decide to stock, but I know what they carry changes to suit what they want to do. A good example are their Cinnamon Raisin Cookies. We used to go through a package of those in like 3-4 days at my office. They all of a sudden stopped carrying them. Did that keep us from going to TJ’s? Not at all. We shifted OUR purchasing habits to accommodate THEM.

We appreciate the quality of the product they carry. It’s a rare occasion that I (and many of my co-workers) dislike something they sell. They have great pricing for the items they sell, more likely than not better than your local Shaw’s or Stop & Shop. And to top it off, it’s many times organic or more healthy than the stuff you get at the other chain places.

My whole thought on this post started from this article about Australia and New Zealand Banking. The CEO and Director John McFarlane had an interview with Alan Kohler of Inside Business about their decision to pull out of Asia, and their subsequent renewal of business in that market. To summarize, they found that their actions in that market cost them more than they were willing to invest at the time, so they removed themselves from a market that was hurting them. Later, the market was found to be much more worth their time and investments, so they moved back into it. Sounds like good decision making to me.

Retreat when it makes sense, and forge ahead when it seems like a good idea. Your customers will let you know when it’s a good time to try something new. Maybe we should be truly customer-centric and really pay attention to what it is they’re really interested in, and what we can do to help them out. In the long run, yes, it can either make us a huge profit, or it can destroy us. But honestly, who can truly tell? ANZ went into Asia the first time thinking it was a great idea. Unfortunately, it was much too early. They realized it, and decided to pull back until it was something they (and their customers) were really ready for.

Thoughts from “Night at the Museum”

It’s from a point made in the movie: Some people are born great, others have greatness thrust upon them. Maybe I’m one of the latter. I’ve never been sure of my position in this world, of what I was meant to do. Maybe this new position offering is something I should seriously consider.

I can’t go into details, since it’s not really a public thing as of right now. However, what it would enable me to do is build relationships, more one-on-one things than I have now. It may help me build “character” and “political capital.” I don’t know yet if it’s something I’d actually be interested in. It sounds interesting. I’d definitely benefit in ways from participating in that way. I just don’t know that it’d be a truly beneficial opportunity in the way I’d like it to be.

Maybe I am just scared of the risk I feel like I’d be taking. It’s certainly a new place for me to venture. Maybe that is my big Dip. I suppose I wouldn’t know until I went through it.

I sure do have plenty to think about this week, while I’m on my vacation. I promise though, I won’t do any actual work while I’m away from the office. :-)

Creating opportunities in a corporate world

Talking with e over at pixelxpixel is always a though-provoker. I was talking with her about my lack of being able to figure out what I want to do with myself professionally. I have some big ideas about what I want to do, but I’ve not been able to figure out how to actually make those ideas a reality.

She pointed out that I am a relative newbie in the corporate business world (which is rather true). I have worked for corporations in every job I’ve had, but I’ve never been closer (in proximity) to the upper management than I am now. I used to think that proximity would be enough to be able to have my ideas and thoughts heard. I’m learning the hard way that that’s not true. At least not the way I’ve been going about attempting to voice my ideas.I’ve been pushing individual ideas to people, yet it feels like very few of them are actually understood and acted upon. I think e was on the right track with explaining why that is.

I don’t speak their language. I don’t know or understand their motives for choosing what they do or don’t do. I only know my perspective, and my reasons for having these ideas and why they would be good for our customers and our company.

As much of a pain as it would be to create one, a well-written and thought-out business plan is a great way to make my idea understood. I would need to prove to the company why it is in their best interests to follow this idea, and make it a reality. Money is king in the corporate world (yay, capitalism! in the words of Austin Powers), and being able to show how this could improve our situation is a great way for me to be heard.

I don’t mean to say that money is the only reason we do things at our company. Some people say that the company is trying to be more “client-centric.” Others want to be better than our competition. We don’t want to lose clients because we can’t compete. My feeling is that to become a client-centric company, we need to look past our competition. Not forget that they’re there, but to know what it is that they have to offer and that they probably have people that are just as good as the ones we have in-house.

To look past the competition, we need to not just make sure we do everything they do. In fact, I think that’s a good way to lose. I don’t think we need to offer the same kind of package they do. We should offer things they are either not capable of doing, or come up with some crazy new idea that they have not produced yet.

e’s perspective for me was this: show the upper management a plan, with the steps included, that will get us to that new point. Explain to them what we do great, what we should stop doing because it doesn’t do us any good, and how doing each of these things in a planned out manner can get us to where we want to be.

I have never written a business plan before, but now is as good a time as any. I want to be successful, and even though I don’t feel like the company is where I think we should be, proselytizing is not the way to get it there. I need to bring myself down to earth, and look at things from a different perspective. I may not like the way things look from there, but that may be the only place I can actually create change.

I don’t know that I can be successful in this kind of venture, but all I can do is try my hardest. I may fail, but I’m guaranteed to learn lessons along the way.

What’s the point?

Ok. I understand it can be hard to start a conversation, or make someone laugh. Maybe that’s not the point here. But if it’s not, I have no explanation for this. A watch, completely covered in leather. You can't see what time it is. You can’t tell what the date is. There’s nothing you can do with this watch other than wear it and try to be funny when someone asks you what the time is. The first time. After that, it’s just stupid, and a waste of time (pun intended).

I guess maybe I just don’t understand “fashion’.

Improving the customer experience, one bullet point at a time

It’s always refreshing to see companies doing things that simplify a user’s need to figure out what they mean.

Red Hat just reworked their Service Level Agreement (SLA)(screenshot). They took a 9-page document and reduced it to 1 page, with 11 bullet points, averaging less than 3 words per bullet. They essentially say that if they produced it, they support it. The situations they don’t cover are spelled out in clear terms, and are relatively few.

There are no confusing legal words, fluff, or other text that would make a lawyer drool. Instead, it’s written in very clear, well spaced, clean text that makes a UI designer drool. :-)

I wish there were more companies making life easy for their clients. There’s really no good reason for them not to, in my opinion. Transparency is what makes me want to do business with a company. Cost becomes less of an issue when I can easily know what they’re willing to do to make me a happy customer.

Of course, actions speak louder than words, so the act of providing service always will do more for proving themselves than just telling me they’ll do it. But this is definitely a step in the right direction.

20 Questions

It’s so easy for me to second-guess my motivations and decisions. I’m really struggling with what my next steps should be. I’ve talked to a few people about what I want to do next at work, but I wonder if there’s even a place for me at this company.

I find myself being more accepting of situations at work than I probably should be. I think I do this because it’s incredibly rare that I can create change or fix a situation by pushing back and expressing my displeasure with it. Too many things are moving out of my influence, and I feel like I’m getting stuck with the short end of the stick. I’m not sure what to do with these conflicts I’m experiencing. I’m pretty convinced that no matter what company I worked for, I’d have to deal with the same junk, and it could be worse.

I’m working hard to keep myself out of certain situations in my personal life too. I think I tend to put myself into places that I’m “expected” to be in, whether I actually want to do so or not. I’m beginning to feel that sometimes choosing to do nothing at all is better than choosing to take an action that puts you in a situation you should not be in.

And of course it’s going to rain all fucking week.

Update: I just ran across a post on Lame excuses for not being a Web professional on 456 Berea St. This fits for me rather well.

Couldn’t have said it better

“You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy,the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn’t want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named Bush, Dick, and Colon.”

–Chris Rock

Is it a wall or a void?

Kathy Sierra has this graphic that shows how you can improve your customer’s passion for your product. She describes the barrier between what you are, what you can get, and what you could be as a wall.

I actually wonder if it’s a void, not a wall.

Let’s take this from a personal life perspective (because that’s where I’m coming from tonight). I think that for me, in my current point in my life, it’s not a wall I need to break through, but more of a void I’m trying to fill. I have a nagging feeling that I shouldn’t be trying to fill it, but rather bridge my way across it. It’s as if every time I throw a shovel of something into the void to fill it that I’ve taken the filler from somewhere else in my life.

I buy stuff to feel like I’m going to do better now that I’ve got this ‘thing’. But that means I’ve taken away from savings. Of course, it’s rather easy for me to rationalize spending money on things as an ‘investment’. But I’m not sure it’s always true.

I get bored or fed up with certain events in my life, so I stop doing that thing and move on to something else. Instead, should I try to improve that point? Instead of quitting, should I try to push harder to close the gap I see in front of myself?

I feel really frustrated at work right now. I feel like I could do so much there, but I’m afraid that I won’t be able to push hard enough to get the right people (see: people in Authority) to say, “Yes, Josh is right, and we really should go that route.” Maybe I’m just not organized enough. Maybe they don't feel like I have the experience and knowledge of a given subject to be accepted as a person to be listened to. I understand that I won’t have 100% of my ideas and suggestions accepted. The hard part for me is to deal with the fact that maybe only 1% will get accepted.

I don’t mean to say I have all the answers. Higher Power knows I don’t. At the same time, I work hard to learn and understand the world around me. I want to know how I can improve other peoples’ lives. I want to know how to become a person of note and to be seen as a guy that they couldn’t do without.

Maybe that’s my problem. Maybe I’m trying too hard to improve other peoples’ lives, instead of working on my own first. I feel like it’s what I need to do to bridge that void. But maybe I’m just misleading myself.

Almost here!

I’m psyched! My new laptop should be here on Monday or Tuesday. It’s a Dell Inspiron 6400. I’ve been looking forward to being able to get work done but not be tied to a desk. My first laptop is going to finally let me do so! I’ll write again once I get to play with it.

:-)