InnovationCompass

Changing Your Players' Positions

Look at any well-coached team.

Each player has been tapped to fill a certain position according to his or her ability. Once the sweet spot is found for an athlete, the coach keeps the player there and continues to help him or her build and refine skills.

The player and the position tend to blend together. Soon, it is difficult to separate the two or think of a player in any other place on the court or field.

This certainly seems like a winning strategy: a coach places his or her players in positions with skill requirements that coincide with the athletes' strengths.

But what happens when your star shooter is benched due to an injury or illness?

How much back-up talent is trained and able to step right in and play on?

Doesn't cementing your players' positions leave you uniquely vulnerable when life happens?

Consider your employees and the positions they currently fill.

Are you actively cross-training your team so that they can step in for a fallen comrade if needed? Does the fellow taking the order have experience in the kitchen (and vice versa)?

Look at your call center. Does anyone answering the telephone have experience behind the counter actually selling the product? Have they ever seen the product? Have they ever experienced the company's service first hand?

Has the chair of your nonprofit board ever spent a day in the shoes of the executive director? Could the board chair effectively fill in temporarily for the ED if something ever happened?

Do your engineers ever hang out with the folks in the shipping department? Does your marketing team ever sit in on a brainstorming session with the engineers?

Yes, it is important to position your team according to their passions and abilities. But changing things up on a regular basis would give each player a unique perspective into someone else's world, and, therefore, his or her own.

Your organization's ability to provide compelling customer experience ratchets up as well.

And the entrepreneurial team or board of directors won't find itself at DEFCON 1 if life intervenes, and a much relied upon employee decides to move on.

Apathy Creep

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference."            -- Elie Wiesel

As any parent of a teenager will attest, there are times when you look into your child's eyes, you no longer see the sparkle of enthusiasm and curiosity.

When you talk of striving for excellence and reaching for the stars, you see glazed eyes, a bit of a slump in the shoulders, and a stifled yawn.

Thankfully, these moments are relatively short-lived, and soon your vivacious, lover of life returns.

But what happens when apathy creeps into an organization? Are you able to know it when you see it? If you recognize it, can you do anything to stop it?

Look around right now.

Do you see evidence of attention or apathy in your nonprofit organization, your retail venture, your restaurant, or your university?

Do you care (a lot) about the small things? Is your store clean, easy to find, and open during convenient hours? Is your staff knowledgeable, friendly, and able to solve problems creatively?

Does your restaurant offer only the freshest of ingredients in customer-designed dishes?

Are you offering the services your customers actually want? How do you know?

What is the energy level of everyone in the organization (from the receptionist to the CEO)? Is the excitement contagious or is the environment stifling?

Is it fun to be a part of your team? Is your love and respect for your customers, employees, and/or board members evident?

Become an expert in locating and routing out apathy.

A Little Tweaking Can Go a Long Way

Seth Godin has a great post (the follow-up post is here) on the value of tweaking websites.

He argues that sometimes all that is needed to improve your site's appearance, impact, and ROI is some artful tweaking.

You don't always need to start from scratch. You don't always need to risk your existing traffic and head off in a completely new direction. You don't always need to invest a lot of time and money.

You do need a tweaking expert who has the benefit of experience seeing first hand what works and what doesn't.

This is great advice for any aspect of your business, especially with regard to the experiences you deliver to your customers.

After all, it is often what seems like the smallest of things that make the biggest difference to your customers.

Maybe you lose the standard-issue bed in your hotel rooms, and, instead, offer this.

Maybe your nonprofit starts telling stories, like this.

Or, maybe, you listen to your customers and extend your hours of operation, because that is what they asked for.

Obviously there are costs involved in some tweaking (like offering Heavenly Beds), but most tweaking could be done without carrying a burdensome cost (nor would it have to be time consuming or distracting for your organization).

The changes to how you currently engage with customers could be relatively small.

What do you need to tweak in your business? What one thing could you tweak right now that would give your customers a completely different and compelling experience?

Tweaking can lead to remarkable changes.

Tell Me a Good Story

What is it about a good story that transports us from the mundane world to magical places?

Maybe it is the shared journey we crave -- being able to experience new adventures with others. Perhaps we are attracted to finding meaning in new narratives that shed light on some of our own darker corners. Or, maybe it is simply our human need to understand others (both near and far) in hopes of finding a deeper connection to the world and to ourselves.

We like to read and hear funny stories, mysterious stories, and stories with happy endings. We are as attracted to "real life" stories as we are those of fantasy. We like a good ghost story, dramatic stories, and stories that detail "the little guy or gal" finding success against all odds.

We like sharing our own stories, pictures, and experiences that shed light on who we are, what we like, and what we value.

When we want others to hear us, we often weave our message into a story.

"Let me tell you what happened ...."

Andy Goodman reminds us in the September edition of Free-Range Thinking that "from courtrooms to classrooms, from the NBA to the GOP, examples of the power of storytelling are everywhere."

If you want to move someone to action, tell a story.

If you want someone to remember your brand, your message, your products, your services, or your nonprofit's mission, tell a story.

If you want to build rapport, build a case, or build a following, tell a story.

Take a look at your marketing messages, how you interact with your customers, and what someone walks away with when they leave you.

Are you inviting us in to share your story?

Are your services and products so extraordinary that we are compelled to talk about them in our stories?

Tell me a good story.

All of us are good listeners when the story is well told.

Putting Hope to Work

What happens when an organization shifts its focus from fear (and driving it out) to one of hope?

In Putting Hope to Work: Five Principles to Activate Your Organization's Most Powerful Resource, Harry Hutson and Barbara Perry examine this shift and answer with examples and practices that any organization may adopt.

According to the authors, the five key principles of hope are possibility, agency, worth, openness, and connection. Hutson and Perry state that when these principles are given life and are nurtured within an organization, hope's rewards soon follow.

"When hope is present in organizations, people think, feel, and act differently; they exhibit courage, and they develop and use capabilities to engagement, to results, and to a sense of well-being."

One of my favorite examples in the book is Best Buy's ethos of "customer centrism."

Best Buy attributes their success to not only finding out exactly what customers need, but also to giving autonomy to employees to passionately and creatively serve their customers.

Hutson and Perry quote Best Buy's Vice Chairman and CEO, Brad Anderson, who states that there are three steps in the Best Buy process.

"First create space for associates to learn about the business and even be educated in capitalism, and then endorse experimentation." Best Buy encourages its employees to take risks in finding new ways to serve customers. Creativity and successful outcomes are rewarded. Failure is taken in stride.

"Second, build on the strengths of each associate." Anderson says to "start where there is readiness either in stores or their managers to undertake this approach, and to be authentic no matter what."

"Third, tell stories about what is going on and communicate successes broadly." By utilizing a variety of methods to communicate its culture to its 100,000 associates, Best Buy fosters hope throughout the organization and inspires an even richer sense of hope.

Perhaps the book's most powerful lesson is this: "Hope offers innovative solutions to tough problems."

After all, tough problems are the stuff of a day in the life of all businesses and nonprofit organizations. Solving tough problems is what each of us do each and every day. Being able to embrace the power of paradoxes and to march creativitely (and confidently) toward solving those problems is held in the palm of hope.

Hope keeps us moving.

Sumo Chairs and Slippery Slopes

RainToday asked 11 experts in selling professional services to name the "one piece of advice you simply cannot sell without." Here is a brief snapshot of the responses contained in their 34-page e-book:

Seth Godin said, "there is only one thing that matters when you're selling professional services. Only one. Does the person who is buying from you (and her boss!) trust you?"

Paige Arnof-Fenn said "authenticity always rules" and "in the end, imposters are always revealed, so it does catch up eventually and then you will be confronted with either feeling like a fraud, or wanting to take an integrity shower, or both. Either way, you lose."

Paul Dunay said, "I firmly believe that the foundation for a truly trusting relationship is to care about whether people succeed because of what it means for them, not for you.... Do you have soul? Are you truly interested in other people's success?"

So why are some companies and bloggers risking forever alienating their customers and readers by stepping on the slippery slope?

Let me explain.

As everyone knows, the Internet's blogosphere and massive social networks create enormous marketing opportunities for companies, politicians, authors, nonprofits, and on and on.

Getting the right traffic to your web site and the right folks to link to you, talk about your product, and give you buzz is key. Many companies are sending their products to highly visible bloggers and asking for them to write about their perceptions of the product online.

So what's the big deal? This isn't all that different from the decades-old tradition of sending bound galleys to a well known author in hopes of securing a publicity quote, right?

Well, I am not so sure.

When Sumo Urban Furniture asked Dave Taylor if he'd review their Sumo Chair and write about it on his blog, he noted his concern this way:

"To be frank, I wasn't very interested in this offer because while there was no requirement to have a positive review, there's still somewhat of an unstated expectation that... nod nod, wink wink... I'd write a positive review."

And then there is the BusinessWeek story in the September 11 edition (p.10) entitled, "A Strategy That Isn't in the Book."

Jena McGregor outlines Fred Reichheld's partnering with BzzAgent to promote his new book, The Utlimate Question.

(According to McGregor, "BzzAgent doesn't pay its agents, nor urge them, it says, to give positive reviews. Agents get points that can be redeemed for prizes by reporting back on their 'buzz' activities.")

McGregor notes that "Bain representatives initially said the book's publisher, Harvard Business School Press, was the source of the campaign. Indeed, Rob Markey, a Bain partner who works with Reichheld, said he was 'disappointed' that BzzAgent people were reviewing the book.

But the publisher wasn't the source. Reached later, Reichheld said he had accepted an offer from BzzAgent's founder and CEO, Dave Balter, for a free word-of-mouth campaign."

So what is wrong with tapping all the potential sources for buzz? Isn't that what a good marketer does?

It makes sense for everyone to disclose, disclose, disclose.

Don't be shy about telling folks how you came to write about Product Y or Service Z. Let readers know where those connections are so they understand the context of the review.

That is what Dave Taylor did in his review of the Sumo Chair.

Reading his full disclosure and honest review (he wasn't wild about it, but his wife liked it and his kids loved it) gave me a much richer understanding of the product (which I trusted).

And Jennifer Goff disclosed to her Brains on Fire audience her BzzAgent status in her review of Seth Godin's Small is the New Big.

Follow Dave's and Jennifer's lead and stay off the slippery slope.

Once you lose your customers' trust and your authentic voice, no one will listen to you again.

A Simple, Effective Fundraising Tool

Connecting with your potential donors through direct mail (and getting in the "A" pile at the post office) is a challenge.

Nonprofit leaders continue to experiment and grapple with designing pieces that go home, get opened, get read, and get results.

Different colors of Inks are tested, envelopes are changed, and messages are tweaked. Sometimes returns are surprising (above 4%). Other times, the effort seems hardly worth it.

One campaign I was involved with many years ago still stands out in my mind.

We broke many of the established "rules" (e.g., always include lots of inserts and response devices) of how one should conduct an effective direct mail campaign. And we found that our inexpensively-produced postcards brought our nonprofit an amazing return.

We held a contest at our local school and asked the children to draw a picture depicting what reading meant to them (the nonprofit organization was a literacy council). We chose the winner, scanned the color art, and reproduced the image with information about the artist on the front of a postcard.

On the other side of the card was a very simple message (which was printed). The salutation and closing were handwritten. A stamp (not a bulk mail stamp) was affixed to the postcard.

For minimal production costs, we found the organizational post office box to be flooded with checks!

We also discovered that the campaign really resonated with our donors.

The card's design told a simple, compelling story. It evoked deep emotions and encouraged recipients to flip it over and read its message. People kept the cards, long after they sent in their donations.

Need Your Email Marketing Problem Fixed?

Over the last week, I have reviewed the features and user friendliness of well over a dozen email marketing software packages. I was getting pretty frustrated with the dearth of templates and counter-intuitive interfaces until I discovered Intellicontact.

Aptly named, this was the first software I tried that was simple to use, yet loaded with features. In particular, I was very impressed with the design aspects of the software. Correctly assuming that the majority of us are not designers (yet we highly value great design), Intellicontact gives you plenty of design templates to choose from (and the ability to customize those templates according to your preferences).

Check out how clean and inviting their home page is.

I also need to point out how responsive their customer service folks are. I emailed a question and received a very prompt and thorough reply. Plus, the fellow was downright friendly.

Great interface, great features, great service, and great price.

The Key to Innovation

Each time I hear David Kelley of IDEO speak, I am reminded that the enemy of innovation is hierarchy.

In an interview posted as a podcast on Iinovate, Matt Wyndowe and Julio Vasconcellos (students at Stanford's Business and Design schools) pose the following question to David Kelley:

For an entrepreneur building a business, how would you advise them to structure their organization to encourage creativity and innovation?

David Kelley responds this way:

"The main thing is ... if you want to be innovative, you've got to use the full power of all the minds in the group. In a group where the boss talks all the time or in a hierarchical operation where like people suck up to the boss or the boss's ideas are implemented more than the receptionist's ideas -- there's a problem there. You want to use everybody's -- all the creativity of the whole place."

This honoring of everyone in your organization and giving them an opportunity to voice their perceptions, thoughts, and ideas must be an authentic, organic part of your organization.

In other words, you can't deem October to be "Customer Experience Month," and ask employees to weigh in with their suggestions once a year.

Truly having empathy for your customers means truly listening to everyone in your organization. Each person in your organization has a unique command of certain stops along the customer's journey. And each person in your organization has the power to make or break the customer's experience.