Business Development

You Are Going To Fail

If you make any kind of effort to develop business, you are going to fail. A lot. Accepting this, and in fact, making it work for you, is the Great Hidden Secret of Biz Dev.

• You're going to call people, and they're not going to call you back.
• You're going to write things -- newsletters, articles, and so on, and they're going to disappear without a ripple.
• You're going to pitch people, and they're going to say "no".
• You're going to feel like a complete idiot.

You have to. There's no other way. Because that's how it works.

A great blog, with a great title, is Dumb Little Man. In a recent post about this topic, Jason Barr wrote the following: I realized I had to be willing to fail in order to succeed.

Nowhere is this more true than in trying to bring in new business. I have been doing this for years, and the bottom line is that the very best at this accept the fact that no matter how good or successful they are, they have to rack up a long string of failures for every success.

Nobody wants to believe this. For some reason, we all think that there's some kind of magic formula, or mysterious talent, that allows some people to bring in business effortlessly, with failure being some kind of distant, remote possibility.

It's not. The better you are, the more you're going to fail, and most important of all, the more you realize that unavoidable failure is a necessary, even healthy, step on the route to success.

Walk Around Your Plane

I'm sitting in the lovely Denver airport, where I've been for a while. During my dinner, I looked out the window, and saw some of the best marketing I've ever encountered -- an American Airlines pilot inspecting his plane before entering the cockpit and taking off.

As I sat there chewing on my dinner, this guy walked VERY slowly around the entire plane, stopping to get a closer look at things like the landing gear, engines and so on. I'm not sure if he was required to do this or just did it on his own, but the impression it created was strong -- this was a pilot, and an airline, that was professional, thorough, and was really concerned with doing things correctly.

The moral here for marketers is that it's not a bad idea, from time to time, to not only show your clients what you do, but how you do it.

How to Really Screw Up Your Firm During A Recession

We're in a recession, right? Right. And the one thing I see firms of all kinds doing, over and over and over and over is basically pulling their heads back in their shells, which means cutting back, especially on marketing.

This is really stupid.

As an example, at one of my firms the big cheeses have totally clamped down on on of my client's marketing expenses. This is bad enough, but this particular client has a business development track record that is ridiculously better than anyone else in the firm. He's really good, his pipeline is full, and he's growing his business unit despite the recession. Yet, he suddenly has to beg and scrape and hustle to spend anything on marketing at all. You know, we're in a recession.

This is really stupid.

A recession creates incredible opportunities. It's really a chance to make a major leap forward in disguise. Yet. a lot of firms have this dopey "How much money can we put in our own pockets RIGHT NOW?" attitude which leads them to have about a twenty-minute timeframe. They cut when they spending. They lay people off when they should be redirecting them, or retraining them. They are constantly fighting the last war rather than the current, or better yet, the next one.

This is really stupid.

 But don't just take my word for it. Listen to Bob Parsons. Parsons is the founder of GoDaddy.com. He's a serial entrepreneur, and a very rich guy. He also really, truly, deeply doesn't care what anyone thinks of him or his business practices. As just one fascinating example, in his advertising, much of the creative focuses around spokeswomen whose key attribute is absolutely massive breasts. Like, say, here.

Parsons is also a video blogger, and his most recent post is entitled "The Best 5-Minute Business Lesson You'll Ever Get" and is all about . . . guess what? Not cutting back during a recession. Aided by his two buxom assistants, Rita and Amber, Parsons spends five minutes demonstrating his point. It's incredibly funny, it's absolutely dead-on right, and I believe anyone running any kind of a professional services firm would do really well to watch this and think about what it says. Hard.

The Secret to Great Writing

Use fewer damn words.

Seriously.

If I had to boil everything I know about how to write down into one rule, that'd be it. I was reminded of this by a post in Michelle Golden's Golden Practices blog.

I see redundancies in my work when I rush and almost always in a first draft or braindump. Calling myself out on it more often, I really notice it now in other people's writing.

There are some first drafts in which you've already written the thing in your head. Those tend to be fairly concise. There are, however, also many first drafts in which you're just thinking out loud. These tend to be absolutely crammed with unnecessary verbiage. It's especially bad if you dictate, which I sometimes do.

In these situations, a halfway decent job requires that you go back through your stuff, look at every single word, and keep asking "Do I need this?" Does the word contribute to the effect of the sentence, move your argument forward, or clarify something? If not, cut it.

You may have to repeat this process several times to remove all the chaff. But boy, does it pay off. Your writing will be way, way better, it will have much more impact on the reader, and you will train yourself, over time, to write more simply.

Winston Churchill understood this. I have always loved his description of how he learned to write simply and well as a schoolboy:

By being so long in the lowest form [at Harrow] I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. . . . I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence - which is a noble thing.

You can become an outstanding writer by knowing what not to write.

Q: How Many Psychiatrists Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb?

A: It doesn't matter. The light bulb has to want to change.

Lately, basically because of coincidence, I've been taking a lot of personality tests. These aren't the kind printed in magazines -- these are allegedly scientific, validatable instruments that categorize your behavioral type. From these, I have learned, or had reconfirmed:

1) My idea of a perfect working environment is borderline chaos.
2) I get bored very easily.
3) I'm an off-the-charts extrovert, and I also tend to rely on intuition much more than logic.
4) Relationships with other people are extremely important to me.
5) I thrive on variety, change and sometimes, risk, and am driven absolutely nuts by routine, bureaucracies and meetings.

This is all great, and very insightful, and maybe even actionable, but the real point of all this is sort of the opposite.

The real point is that many, perhaps even most of my clients, are not like this at all. If I am going to communicate successfully, and effectively, with them, I have to do it in a way that they can understand. This means slowing down, being more structured, less extroverted, and so on.

It seems obvious, but it's the single biggest problem in marketing. A lot of professional services marketing is done face-to-face, and in these situations, it's absolutely not about you. It's about the other person, the prospective client. That other person, like you, has a personality, and that personality has certain measurable, definable characteristics. If you are going to convince them of anything, or motivate them to take action, or even work with the successfully and collaboratively, you have to communicate with them in a way that is natural for them, and adapt your thought process and patterns to theirs.

If, for example, the other person has a decisive, action-oriented personality -- i.e., they're not into pondering, analysis or lengthy evaluation of things, then you are going to be a lot more effective with them if you begin your communication by getting right to the point.

If, on the other hand, your opposite number is more thoughtful, process-oriented, patient and analytic, if you come blasting in, full of let's-get-it-done enthusiasm, and just get to the point without explaining how you got there, you're going to alienate them, and possibly irritate them to some degree. You'll get a lot less done.

The single best piece of advice I could give anyone marketing any kind of service is to slow down, pay close attention to the other person's personality, and to communicate in ways that respect and will be understood by them.