The soda fountain has every choice you could want: cola, root beer, ginger ale, cherry, lemon lime, iced tea, even water.
My kids look at all that and make swamp juice.
What do your customers really want from all the features, functions, and best practices built into your product? A logical choice? No. They don’t buy that; they buy on emotion.
And free re-fills.
In your toolbox, your magic toolbox, you have wrenches and pliers and screwdrivers. With these tools, you can tighten, loosen, hold, and adjust. What more could you want?
In your world, your real world, you have an endless variety of problems. When you look at your toolbox from that perspective, you suddenly see that the screwdriver is a handy pry-bar and that pliers can hold the nut in place while you pound the bolt it with a wrench.
In your business system, your magical business system, you have products, customers, and prices. With these you can take orders, manage returns and issue invoices. What more could you want?
In your world, your real world, you have an endless variety of problems. When you look at your business system from that perspective, you suddenly see that the call center can help create leads for the sales team, and that the order system can hold inventory in place while you enter an order and schedule delivery.
Focus your attention on the business need and then see what’s in your toolbox. You may even find yourself saying “Oh, so that’s what this is for.*”
*I’ve got a drawer in the toolbox I inherited from my father in law that contains all sorts of tools whose purpose I can’t divine. When a fix-it problem has me stymied, I rummage around the drawer and sure enough, “Oh, so that’s what this is for.”
As the subject matter experts, rock-stars that we are, we’re often burdened with taking the customer’s challenges and needs and developing our position, messaging, and solutions for the rest of the team.
We all know it is easier to edit than create, and therein lies the challenge. After blood, sweat, and tears are invested in solution creation, the meddling fools who delegated the creation authority to us in the first place feel the need to take our effort and begin the process again from the beginning, turning over each stone.
And turning them over again. And again.
The horse is dead.
Stop beating it.
Stop thinking on our time; We’ve invested our creative effort offline, previously, and have communicated it to you with good reason. Be a professional, stay up to date, and be prepared.
The review is not the starting point; it’s the affirming close.
In a recent engagement, I’ve been paired with a pecuniary peer in pursuit of building a business case.
We worked together with the customer in a workshop and emerged with very different interpretations. On its own, this is not surprising- ask different individuals what happened in a meeting and you’ll get different answers- but we had core and complimentary purposes for the workshop. I found obstacles and points of change. The logical implications and resolutions flowed from that seed. He found an accounting indicator that was far out of range (and not in a good way) for the customer’s industry.
I focus from the qualitative perpective, taking processes, systems, information, strategies and data and craft the logical argument; he approaches from the quantitative perspective, taking processes, systems, information, strategies and data and crafts the fiancial justification.
Together we earned executive buy in. We made a formidable team.
This post was originally titled “Logic vs. Data,” but that’s wrong. It’s not Yin vs. Yang; it’s Yin and Yang.
We’ve all been to a meeting or an event where a bit of corporate culture was born. Meeting catch-phrases and events take on a humorous life of their own and become a relationship link among the participants, becoming the stuff of legends. Konica Minolta’s commercials and The Office series are chock full of examples of this.
Though we try to boil down our messaging into catchy themes and analogies, there’s no guarantee they’ll resonate. So work with the audience to find what does stick. Corporate-culture themes can emerge in the midst of a presentation if you’re listening for them.
If an audience member volunteers it, maybe as a wisecrack, a comment on bullet point, or a strong opinion, positive or negative, of what you’re saying or showing, all the better. You’ve got something you can work with. Hold on to it. Play it up. Repeat it in a different context and in a humorous, self-deprecating way. If another audience member joins in the fun, you’re set, you’re immortal, you have been crowned a legend.
Two years down the road, when you bump into someone who was there, they won’t remember your name, they won’t even remember what you were showing, but when they say the secret catch-phrase, you’ll have a good laugh and an even better bond.
Everyone recognizes the leader- he’s the one in front.
But is it in your customer’s best interest to pick the frontrunner?
There are so many ways of getting to the lead; some deserved, some not:
Which are you this time?
In golf they don’t ask how, they ask how many.
In business, your customer might be wise to focus on how the frontrunner got there.
We’re not here to teach, though we are here to explain.
We take our user interfaces, technology stacks, business processes, data, and reports and present a tasty jambalaya to our audiences. We take complexity and convey simplicity through a memorable theme and three bullet points.*
We take an audience from “I don’t get it,” to “I want to get it.”
It’s some ‘splaining we do.
*because two aren’t enough and four is too many
Every cycle you engage in- win, lose, or draw- you gain experience.
That experience brings out the finer points, the little touches and nuances that make a difference. A point of positioning here, and understanding of the user’s life there, and tips about using projectors and podiums and whiteboards everywhere.
There’s always another level of competition. There’s always a better way to convey the message. There’s always a way to change, to improve.
Keep climbing the spiral staircase up and through the stratosphere. Otherwise you’re just doing a job.
In any system, there’s an infinite range of detail to be explored and understood, from the micro details of individuals screens, fields, and usability quirks to the macro concepts of departmental functions, business processes and strategic initiatives.
Our challenge is to set the depth of focus that best communicates to our audience. We need to meet them where they are and provide painless navigation down into the details. We need to pull them out of the weeds and sum those details back into high level value.
It might take a moment to find that focus for an audience, but it’s imperative they come away with what they need. So adjust your zoom until they can see clearly.
It’s not about what you want to say, it’s about what they need to hear.
Nothing works like an analogy to help an audience come to a shared understanding.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in initial qualifications, discovery meetings, or final solution presentations. When you can effectively characterize their situation, their systems, or their goals, an engaged customer will grab onto the characterization and start using it, changing it, adding on to it. They’ll use it to explain to their peers who didn’t make the meeting. It will become the water-cooler joke. They’ll name the project after it. They’ll remember it when you visit them two years later.
In a recent discovery meeting, we came to the realization with the customer that they “just wanted to replace the old van,” and nothing more. What do you think the demo theme is going to look like?