When you get your hair cut, there’s usually a big mess on the floor when you’re done. The same applies when you’re solving business problems with customers:
When you get your hair cut, there’s usually a big mess on the floor when you’re done. The same applies when you’re solving business problems with customers:
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.
Early in my career, I read George Will’s excellent “Men at Work,” which not only made a baseball fan out of me, but helped me understand professionalism. Hard work, practice, and development of skills apply to talent-related activities, not just white collar careers.
Is a creative person talented or professional? Neither. Both. The creative person has a different end in mind. For example:
If they give you a box of Legos and you build the little space-ship or car pictured on the cover, you’re solving problems; if you take that same box of Legos and make a trebuchet out of it, you’re being creative.
You have the same ingredients, the same effort, but completely different goals.
As new technologies are introduced, they go through stages of maturity in the marketplace. Initially innovative, and therefore expensive, they grow to be commonplace and ultimately become a commodity (or forgotten).
Somewhere along that curve, from breakthrough invention to optimized revenue scalability, communication of the technology’s benefits migrates from the inventor to engineers to pre-sales to order takers to the discount end-cap at Target.
Remember Palm Pilots?
During the time a technology is in pre-sales stewardship, it is your responsibility and joy to discover, understand, and bring to others.
Enjoy the technology in its ride. But don’t hang on too long. The next great thing is preparing to change what you do.
What will next year bring?
Years ago, in a discovery session with a manufacturing company, my peers (manufacturing, planning, and production) poked and prodded as we walked about the facility, asking insightful questions about the customer’s operations, the challenges they faced, how they ran this and that process, when they resorted to manual lists and spreadsheets, when they made decisions with autonomy, when they went up the hierarchy; they even discussed the most economical approach cutting small pieces of steel out of a large piece of scrap.
In short, my peers proved themselves to be not just product and solution experts, but to truly be subject matter experts.
The moment that most impressed me was at the end of the day when, gathered around a table (okay, a folding-table like you get at Sam’s Club) in a conference room just off the manufacturing floor, one of my peers exhaled a sigh and summarized her day with, “Well, I guess you’re a manufacturing company.” Chuckles and agreement all around. Obvious but true.
This is winning the deal in discovery.
“What will you be demonstrating in the booth at the customer conference?”
Well, how can you know? Who is going to walk up? What will their needs be?
And so, before demonstrating generic solutions to generic problems, engage in discussions about their business, their challenges, their needs.
Between the two of you, on a blank sheet of paper, draw circles and lines expressing a conceptual solution with the myriad players and processes involved. Then demonstrate specific solutions to their problems, hitting the points meaningful to them.
In the past you could tear off the sheet and hand it to the patron as a keepsake but these days they’ll just snap a picture with their phone and walk on.
Have you seen the documentary Helvetica? It starts as a history of the font, then turns into a thought provoking discussion on graphic design.
Graphic design matters- it is the aesthetic.
Look around. When you’re aware of good and bad graphic design you’ll notice:
Can you see graphic design (or lack of it) now?
Turn your attention to our domain, enterprise software. Graphic design seems an afterthought, limited to trim-work. Look at the solutions you present. They are basically:
An opportunity?
Enterprise applications are going mobile. Decent graphic design is built into platforms (It’s pretty hard to screw up an iPad user interface).
In a world of free creative tools, anyone can take a picture, anyone can record an album, anyone can self-publish a book. In the hands of graphic design professionals, working alongside architectural and process designers, enterprise software can be inherently appealing and useful. Even beautiful.
Our audiences are sensitive to the aesthetic. It means usability, which means adoption which means return on investment which means value. Decision makers will choose the more pleasing option over the more functional if they can see themselves using the pleasing option.