Change "have" to "choose"

Sorry for being AWOL for a bit.  I've been juggling the youth soccer league, the Blackman Kallick Merger with Plante Moran, and our annual fundraiser for The Holiday Heroes Foundation.

Now that those are either over or in full swing, I can come back here and finish some blogs. And I will... soon.

In the meantime... Read this post from Harvard Business Review: If You Don't Prioritize Your Life, Someone Else Will.  

The second piece of advice, i.e. changing "have to" to "choose to" is amazingly liberating.  Try it and let me know how it goes ... or if you start choosing not to.

The third piece of advice requires that you have quickly and clearly articulated values. (I call mine "philosophies" to avoid any religious discussions and because they guide my working relationships, not my life decisions.) Many people who work with me know my two philosophies*.  And I advise leaders to let their staff and clients know theirs.

Do your clients and staff know yours?

But that's off the point of this post.

The reason I wrote it was because the "choose to" advice is damn good and it forced me to come here and post it to my meager reader base.


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*What are they? 1) Don't pee in the pool.  2) A rising tide rises all boats.  

Ain't Talkin', Just Walkin' – Inspiration Comes From Odd Places

Question: Where do you find inspiration for your business development efforts?  

Some people find their motivation from YouTube Videos with soaring music, spacious images and cliches.  And that's fine.

Others find motivation from inspirational case stories such as people who climb mountains with only one leg, recover from tragedy/beat illness, and succeed despite odds that make you embarrassed to complain when the barista puts skim and not soy milk in your latte. And that's fine, too.

Me, many years ago in NYC: "I hate shaving."My roommate: "If you had no hands, you'd be happy to be able to complain about hating shaving." (Even so, I grew a beard.)

For business development, for me, it's a combination of three things:

1) Curiosity.  I meet a new person and I really want to know what they do, how they help others, what sets them and/or their offerings apart, and how they go about letting others know about this stuff.

2) Data.  I kind of get off on listening to folks say "Great work sells itself" and then checking to see the growth of their client base and the number of people they've networked with in the past 90 days, as well as their other business development efforts.  (Hint: doing a good job/having quality products are table stakes, not your business development plan. I have tons of data to prove this.)


Also, I like seeing how opportunities arise - using spreadsheets and forms.  Often, business developers are so sure they know who refers them business and how opportunities appear.  Often their beliefs are anecdotal and the actual metrics do not fully support them, or identify unnoticed veins of opportunity.  This takes effort, but the strategy is about as simple as it gets: Things that work once tend to work again. Things that work twice tend to work over and over again.

When you walk in the gym and suddenly feel tired, how do you steel your heart for the work-out, and even push yourself to do one more rep, one more mile, 100 more calories, ten more pounds?

3) The music in my iPod.  Today, while on the treadmill (since it was too cold for rollerblading), Bob Dylan's "Ain't Talkin', Just Walkin'" came on.  I found this motivational.  Four simple words.  I also like the lines: "Heart burnin', still yearnin'" and "My mule is sick, my horse is blind."  Now the rest of the song isn't very inspiring from a BD perspective, but I do like the idea that Bob Dylan (or the fictional singer of this song) is simply moving forward and not spending time telling people about what he "plans" to do. 

So... from where do you find inspiration for your business development efforts? (Post below if you are so inclined.)  If you don't know, perhaps finding this source would help motivate you to put one foot in front of the other and move forward. 

/talkin'.

Hang on Loosely: Remove Streetlights, I Mean, Controls and Perhaps You Will Get Better Results

"...if you cling too tightly, you're gonna lose control."

First watch this video about what people will do when it's assumed they will do the right thing.

So what does removing streetlights in England have to do with Marketing and Business Development?

We, as marketing strategists, tend to see two different responses to lower-than-desired marketing/bizdev performance: tighten controls (punish inaction) vs. increase empowerment (reward spirited effort).

First a caveat: I am not talking about decreasing measurement. You can (and should) continue to measure activity and not simply results, but how do you get that activity? Do you loosen controls and promote the spirit of the rule? Or do you tighten controls and ding people when they fail to hit those additional metrics?

It's pretty obvious where my head is here: hang on loosely.

People succeed in different ways. If I say everyone needs to go to two networking events every month – and we will measure attendance – we should expect to see a lot of "12" scores in six months, but should also expect to see widely varying results (sales, connections, engagement scores of the resulting contacts, etc.).

In any case, so far so good. We have everyone going to 24 networking events every year. This should end well.

But now we see that this "two per month" strategy isn't getting me as far as we expected. What happens next is the fork in the road.

Do we...

1) Add additional controls, such as requiring them to collect four business cards at each event? That's 96 cards per person per year!

2) Teach them networking strategies and reward those who move their new contacts to the next level?

Why not do both? Sure, why not? Anything else you want to add to our unending pile of tasks?

Moving on... if you had to pick one, which would you pick?

My advice is to pick #2.

If you select #1... No amount of controls will get the "letter-of-the-law" people to create break-through results. But you will force the "spirit-of-the-law" people into checking off boxes they do not feel have any value and might interfere with their ability to get to that value. Worse still, in my opinion, you might find yourself dinging the "spirit" folks for only making three contacts, when they are actually getting far more value from their three contacts than your "letter" folks are providing from their four.

And then what happens next?

More controls. And more controls. And more of your "spirit" folks checking off boxes to get you off their backs. And getting punished (or having to argue for exceptions) when they are doing the right thing!

Back to the video.

Yes, of course some people will "cheat" and not take turns ... and they will be rewarded by getting to their destination a few seconds faster for doing so. And that's not fair! And that makes us angry! But it makes us angry at them, not at the people who made the rules. This is an important distinction for those of us who believe morale is critical.

Most importantly, the majority of people will do the right thing and, in the end, the overall value to everyone is extraordinary.