Speed

The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong.

— Ecclesiastes

Before you agree with Solomon, consider: 50% of sales are closed by the B2B sales rep who's first to call back an online lead, according to CEB.

That's daft, when you think about it. Speed is more important to a lot of B2B customers than efficiency, effectiveness, professionalism, or product knowledgeable.

You snooze, you lose.

And lot of reps are asleep.

According to Harvard Business Review, B2B reps take an average of 42 hours to get back to an online lead.

That's crazy, HBR says, given that the reps who call within 1 hour are 7 times more likely to reach the lead than reps who take 2 hours to call—and 60 times more likely than reps who take 24 hours to call.

According to Salesforce, 87% of B2B customers expect a rep's text-message response within 1 hour, and 67% expect a rep's email response within 1 hour. According to Shopify, 77% of B2B buyers won't wait more than 6 hours for a rep to respond.

With that degree of impatience, it's no wonder the race goes to the swift.

Reps need to wake up and quit ignoring online leads.

They may not all be qualified, but they're apparently ready to buy.

You Ain't No Forrest Gump

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

— Seneca

When it favored a ship coming into port, Ancient Romans would say the wind was ob portus.

The Latin phrase gives us our word opportunity.

We think of every opportunity as something a "good wind" blew our way.

But like Roman seafarers, you have to have the port in sight before you can gauge the wind.

Know where you're heading before you assess an opportunity.

You ain't no Forrest Gump.

What Clothes are You Wearing?

Ever since the Creative Revolution, marketers have insisted brands have character.

A brand, they say, can be friendly, playful, rebellious, sexy, wise or generous—or possess any of a score of other human- or animal-like attributes.

Marketers can feel vindicated in this belief by the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United that corporations are people.

They can also feel vindicated by the lending practices of banks, which define "character" as a business' willingness to pay back a loan.

Character, according to the National Association of Credit Management, "imputes a level of ethics, integrity, trustworthiness and quality of management that is provided or available to the business."

So what's your brand's character?

Is it admired, adorable, confident, dynamic, efficient, fair, honorable, innovative, kind-hearted, likable, painstaking, plucky, proud, romantic, self-assured, silly, sincere, thoughtful, upbeat, warm, willing, witty or wonderful? Or is it something else?

Well, here's a hint: Despite all your words, your brand's character is not what you say it is, but what your customers perceive it to be.

As Priceline's co-founder Jeff Hoffman says, a brand's character is a lot like clothing: what you choose to wear every day forms others' opinions of you.
As the old saying goes, clothes make the man—or the brand.

The company Hoffman co-founded, Priceline, says it's admired and innovative.

But Priceline's recent refusal to refund me the price of tickets that it admits in writing it cancelled tells me the brand's character—the company's words notwithstanding—is altogether different. Try abusive, arrogant, callous, creepy, deceitful, evasive, greedy, malicious, materialistic, mean, nasty, obnoxious, pesky, ruthless, savage, self-serving, sneaky, tacky, tiresome, venomous, vile, wicked, and wolflike.

What clothes are you wearing?

UPDATE: I received a phone call late today from Priceline's PR department. The individual who called informed me the company had decided to refund the cost of my tickets in full, and would process the refund to my credit card within one day.

Marketers Have Always Been Liars

Part 3 of a 3-part series on business strategy.

An old business saying, Mercator told readers of the May 1893 edition of Saddlery and Harness, goes, “Get money honestly if you can, but get money.”

It's an adage that can lead businessmen to lie.

But is it okay to tell customers a lie?

Mercator says, yes, in two instances.

First, it's okay to use "elastic terms of quality."

"In strict truth, only the best that can be made should be styled best," he writes, "yet we find in the bridle trade several qualities better, bearing such distinctions as best best, super, extra super, and so on. Here, though there is a departure from the truth, it is so well understood by the buyer that there is no deception, and therefore no dishonesty."

Second, it's okay to display “pretenses as to home manufacture.”

“Nowadays," Mercator writes, "the still so-called boot and shoe maker is only a seller or distributor, and in most cases sends even his repairs out, not needing to employ any workmen on his own premises. The same remarks apply to the soi distant watch and clock makers, whose only occupation is cleaning, not one in a thousand being able to make a watch or clock is it were to save his life.”

So it's okay to imply that you make what you sell, Mercator says—provided customers aren't deceived.

“There certainly are degrees of deviation from the strict truth which commercial customs almost compel everyone to conform to, and so long as the buyer well understands these things, and is in no sense deceived thereby, there is no dishonesty in practice.”

But stray afield of these claims, and you run the risk of discovery.

"The false pretense, although so common in so many trades, is always to be deplored, since it sometimes leads to false representation and untruth," Mercator writes.

"Where, as in the case of the so-called bootmaker, everyone knows the truth, no harm is done, but whenever a buyer is deliberately deceived and hoodwinked, then it amounts to dishonorable dealing. In all these matters the old Latin proverb should be borne in mind—Magna est veritas et praevalebit—the truth is great and will prevail."

Sound a tad quaint?

On his blog, Seth Godin writes, "When you are busy telling stories to people who want to hear them, you’ll be tempted to tell stories that just don’t hold up. Lies. Deceptions.

"This sort of storytelling used to work pretty well. Joe McCarthy became famous while lying about the 'Communist threat.' Bottled water companies made billions while lying about the purity of their product compared to tap water in the developed world.

"The thing is, lying doesn’t pay off any more. That’s because when you fabricate a story that just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, you get caught. Fast."

Horse Sense

Part 1 of a 3-part series on business strategy.

As the plethora of podcasts on the topic proves, freelancers' and entrepreneurs' craving for business advice is insatiable.

Those seekers of commercial know-how could do no better than Mercator's 10-part series, "Business: Reasons of Failure and Roads to Success."

It's not a podcast, but a series of articles that ran in the British trade journal Saddlery and Harness between August 1892 and June 1893 (the author took December off).

Who Mercator was remains a mystery; but that hardly makes his advice―tips on everything from advertising to time management―any less sound.

On the subject we'd call "focus," Mercator's advice is as pointed as any you'd hear from Seth Godin or Gary Vaynerchuk:

"Amongst the answers given by businessmen to the question as to the chief causes of failure occur the following," Mercator says. "'Unwillingness to labor and wait,' 'lack of perseverance,' 'haste to get rich,' 'undue haste to accumulate,' 'drifting,' 'unwillingness to achieve success in the old-fashioned way,' 'waiting for opportunities,' 'unwillingness to work persistently,' 'lack of appreciation for the opportunities of life,' 'unsteadiness of purpose,' 'lack of persistent application,' 'unwillingness to begin at the foot of the ladder and work up.'"

All these causes of failure, he says, amount to one thing: disdain for details.

"It is a common thing for us to speak of our great men as genii, and to suppose that a genius is a man who from his birth inherited a superiority of brain which was bound to carry him to excellence, when he took up the line of life he was especially gifted for," Mercator says.

"To a certain extent, and in certain cases this is undoubtedly true; but what definition did one of our greatest writers and scholars—Carlyle—give of genius? He said genius is nothing more or less than 'the capacity for taking infinite pains.' This, indeed, is the secret of the success of the most eminent men in all times.

"Take Newton and all the most celebrated astronomers; take Stephenson, Brunel and all the famous engineers; take Watt, Edison, and all clever inventors; take Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone, and most of the principal politicians and prime ministers of England; take great poets, artists, warriors, and all the men who have risen to eminence in the world, and you will find that they have almost all been famous for their industry, their patience and their perseverance."

Sound too quaint?

In 1995, Steve Jobs told Computerworld, “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”

Passion Fruit

Without passion, you don't have energy; without energy, you have nothing.

― Donald Trump

If I had a nickel for every time some guru said success stems from passion, I'd be living in Mar-a-Lago.

Sure, passion's prerequisite―but far less so than money, talent, timing and luck.

Passion alone, however, can lead to distinction. It won't lead to "great;" but it can lead to "worst."

Consider the case of Ed Wood, the Hollywood hack who earned distinction as "worst director of all time."

Passion alone―and he was passionate―couldn't carry him to greatness. The tides ran against him.

"Ed Wood wasn’t the worst filmmaker of all time," says film critic Matt Singer, "but he might have been the unluckiest.

"His life story is a series of missed opportunities and broken promises. He would prepare a film, and the financing would fall through. He’d plan a project for an actor, and the actor would die. He made what would become one of the most famous movies in history, then thoughtlessly sold the rights to it for a single dollar to pay his rent."

"Passion is the genesis of genius," Tony Robbins says.

But passion alone can bear bitter fruit. 

Unbacked by money, talent, timing and luck, passion is the font of failure.

United Breaks Guitars. But Priceline Breaks Contracts.

You've probably heard Dave Carroll's story.

He's the musician whose $1,200 guitar was broken by United Airlines baggage handlers.

Dave tried for nine months to move the company to honor his claim. But United said "No," because he'd failed to submit the claim within 24 hours of the incident.

So he wrote and recorded a song, "United Breaks Guitars," and uploaded it to YouTube.

After only 150,000 views, United contacted Dave and offered to pay the claim if he'd delete the video.

Dave instead produced and uploaded two more, related songs, at which point the media picked up his story. He did over 200 interviews.

Then, the song parodies and knockoffs started, and millions of people learned to sing "United Breaks Guitars." On one flight from Newark, New Jersey, the passengers sang it in chorus as the plane taxied to the terminal.

Within three weeks, the company's stock plummeted by 10%, a decrease in value of $180 million.

A week ago, my wife and I tried to board a flight from Washington, DC, to London, using tickets we'd purchased for $1,200 six months earlier through Priceline, only to learn the company had cancelled the tickets.

When I called Priceline from the airport, I was told it had indeed cancelled the tickets in September and would not issue a refund. Ever. "We do not issue refunds," I was told.

My wife and I made other travel arrangements, at six times the cost of the cancelled Priceline tickets.

Next week, I'll send a brief protest letter to Priceline's executive chair, Jeff Boyd.

I'll remind Mr. Boyd of Dave Carroll's story and close the letter with the words, "Song to follow."

Failure

Woody Allen once told The New York Times, "If you're succeeding too much, you're doing something wrong."

Most people dread failure, so much so, they forgo any opportunity posing risk.

But failure brings transformation.

Edison failed repeatedly, but was undaunted. "I have not failed 10,000 times," he said. "I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work."

"The person who fails the most wins," Seth Godin says.

To keep failing, you've got to be good enough to keep playing.

Before he became an author, Godin was a book packager, producing a book a month for 10 years. You can bet that producing 120 books―many of which bombed―taught him about writing best-sellers.

Burn the Boats

Resolving to begin life anew, when the mutineers of the HMS Bounty reached Pitcairn Island, they burned the boat.

Like the Bounty's crew, many of today's publishers and associations must self-administer the shock that flings them into the "conquer or be killed" mindset, or they're sure to wither and die.

Burning the boats—destroying outdated, expensive and unprofitable products and programs—may indeed take a few mutineers. Comfortable execs and boards aren't about to do it.

At Super Niche Media Event this week, I heard that idea expressed by attendees many times.

It may take a new generation to lead these organizations to burn the boats and behave like brands. Provided the ships don't sink beforehand.

Expanding Your Boundaries?

According to Bain consultants Chris Zook and James Allen, a company can grow profitably in two ways: by diversifying or by expanding the boundaries of its core business, or what they call entering adjacencies.

Their study of thousands of companies has led them to say there are six ways to enter an adjacency:

• Expand along the value chain (De Beers moved from wholesaling into retailing diamonds, for example).
  
  
• Use new distribution channels (supplement maker EAS moved from selling to nutrition stores to selling to Wal-Mart).
  
  
• Enter new countries (Vodafone expanded from the UK to Europe, the US, Germany, and Japan).
  
  
• Address new customer segments (discount broker Charles Schwab became an advisor to the super wealthy).
  
  
• Offer new products and services (IBM pioneered "global IT" and doubled its earnings).
  
  
• Build a new business based on an in-house capability (American Airlines created Sabre, which in turn created Travelocity).

From their study, Zook and Allen also conclude that companies which learn to enter an adjacency, then repeat their recipe again and again, grow at twice the speed of rivals—at a minimum.

How about you? Are you expanding your boundaries?

My new business partner and I, while our direct marketing agency is still in its infancy, have already added six new products and services to the four core offerings we opened shop with in January, including PR, video production and marketing research.

We're following advice you can find in Competing Against Luck, whose authors say customers never "buy" products and services, but "hire" them "to get a job done."

We're designing a menu based on jobs our customers need to get done. We might not grow at the pace of Charles Schwab or IBM, but we're trying—and learning a lot in the process.

I'll keep you posted, in any event.

I MIss the Mob

In Anything You Want, entrepreneur and blogger Derek Sivers recounts a trip he made to Las Vegas for a trade show.

On the ride from the airport to his hotel, Sivers asked the taxi driver how long he'd lived there.

"Twenty-seven years," the driver replied. "I miss the mob.”

The cabbie then explained what he meant. Doing business in Las Vegas was simple when the mafia ran the casinos. When the mob made money, you made money. But corporate takeover of the casinos brought hordes of penny-pinching MBAs to town. They cheapened everyone's experience.

“When the mafia ran this town, it was fun."

The lesson Sivers took home from his driver: keep your business simple, and keep its goal enjoyment.

"Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing," Sivers writes. 

"Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?"

More or Less

Seth Godin defines the "race to the bottom" as the drive to deliver more for less.

Above all qualities, winning the race demands inveterate stinginess and a knack for constant streamlining.

"The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win," he warns.

Today's winner, inevitably, becomes tomorrow's loser.

The "race to the top," on the other hand, is the drive to deliver more for more.

Some customers—not all—value more ("more meaning, more insight, more joy") enough to pay more for it.

The race to the top is the one you want to join, Godin says.

"The race to the top is focused on design and respect and dignity and guts and innovation and sustainability and, yes, generosity."

Sound a bit fanciful?

Then consider the difference between a small hotel and a boutique one.

My wife and I routinely lodge in Wildwood, New Jersey, so we can visit relatives who live nearby.

Our most recent stay was in a small hotel. It filled our needs, but barely. And even though—with its faux mid-century fixtures and decor—it strove to be memorable, the hotel was frighteningly forgettable. A good portion of each day, it wasn't even staffed; guests were on their own. The linens were commercial-grade. The common areas were stark. The self-serve breakfast was foodservice quality. And the coffee was bland.

Our prior stays, in contrast, were at Candlelight Inn, a B&B. The owners deliver on their website's promise to "make memories every day:"

• The building and its furnishings are period—not faux—Victorian
• Each room for let is markedly unique
• The ambiance begs you to relax, feel good, and feel pampered
• The owners are keen to learn your tastes and preferences, and let you know they value your business
• The owners strive to deliver more, including a culinary surprise or two every day

During future visits, we know where we'll stay.

So what's your business model?

More for more?

Or more for less?

Basics

A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.

― Michael LeBoeuf

McDonald's CEO told investors last week his company will go back to basics.

The flip comes after research revealed customers had fled the chain not to fancy, fast-casual restaurants like Panera and Chipotle, but to other fast-food joints like Burger King and Five Guys.

To escape the pickle, McDonald's plans to beef up its burger recipes; roll out mobile ordering and home delivery; and fork over $1.1 billion for store renovations.

The company will no longer dish out wraps, salads, oatmeal, and other high-end food.

The move comes two years after McDonald's canned the CEO's predecessor and Consumer Reports ranked the chain's burgers as the nation's worst.

The lessons here are basic:

• No business can survive if its offerings are flawed

• Sound strategy often lies in what a business chooses not to do

In his autobiography Grinding It Out, McDonald's founder, Ray Kroc, got to the meat of it:

"Perfection is very difficult to achieve, and perfection was what I wanted in McDonald's. Everything else was secondary for me."

Road Closures

You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth 

may be the best thing in the world for you. 

— Walt Disney

Business setbacks haunt those unequipped for adversity.

That's just about everyone.

You slave over relationships and infrastructure, only to find the universe doesn't want another product like yours (at least, not enough to pay for it).

So you accept the lesson and move on, sadder but wiser. Or you:

• Don blinders and blame the customers
• Get angry and blame the employees
• Get stoned before lunchtime
• Keep beating the dead horse
• All of the above

Limited information, skills and equanimity all get in the way of clarity and acceptance, especially during business setbacks.

The best way to deal with them is to reconnect with your "why" (why did we start this venture in the first place?) and remind yourself of everything you accomplished along the road to failure.

Inch by Inch

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has always found ways to leverage technology—whether e-commerce, rockets, drones or cloud computing—to give his company's flywheel another jolt.

Who doesn't want to find the profit-turning flywheel Bezos runs, the one Jim Collins describes in Good to Great?

But the truth is, you don't find it; you cultivate it.

"No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop," Collins says. "There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution."

A flywheel is not the creation of the fast-buck "mercenary" (Bezos' term), but of the "missionary"—the patient, purpose-driven businessman or woman.

Boots

Here's to the bootstrappers, those entrepreneurs who make do on a shoestring. They sustain the American Dream.

Here's to the bootleggers, the copycats who ride the backs of first-movers and make them look good.

And here's to the bootlickers, without whose undying service there'd be no room for bootstrapping or bootlegging.

It doesn't much matter which pair you wear, but only that others will ask, "Who'll fill her boots when she's gone?"

Entering Adjacencies and Bringing It All Back Home

"Entering adjacencies has become the growth strategy du jour," Ken Favaro says in Strategy+Business.

Some companies aren't good at it (remember Harley-Davidson's Men's Colognes or United' Airlines' TED?); others excel (Apple's iPhone and Disney's Cruise Line are examples).

The danger in entering adjacencies is “averaging down,” Favoro says. You may subsist in two markets, but you won't be exceptional in either.

Do people face the same danger when they stray from their core competence?

"We often stop surprising ourselves (and the market) not because we're no good anymore, but because we are good," Seth Godin says. "So good that we avoid opportunities that bring possibility."

Opening yourself to possibility may very well court danger:

• The New York Times lambasted an exhibit of Bob Dylan's paintings."The color is muddy, the brushwork scratchily dutiful, the images static and postcard-ish. The work is dead on the wall."
  

• In its review of Jon Stewart's feature film Rosewater, NPR said, "Stewart shows no signs that he can handle such tonally complex material."
  

• Paul Simon's Broadway musical The Capeman opened to universally poor reviews and ran for less two months. The New York Times said, "The show registers as one solemn, hopelessly confused drone."
  

• Hans von Bülow called one of Friedrich Nietzsche's musical compositions “the most undelightful and the most antimusical draft on musical paper that I have faced in a long time.”

Compared to the artists' other work, these missteps fairly stink (a lot like Harley-Davidson Cologne). But they prove the artists aren't afraid to change, take risks, or be a bit incompetent.

"Competent people have a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems," Godin says. "They solve a problem the same way, every time. That's what makes them reliable. That's what makes them competent."

But competent people hate change—even though change opens possibilities of fresh perspectives, disruptions and breakthroughs—because it threatens their reputations.

For people, entering adjacencies—opening to possibility and taking a flyer—is a lot like foreign travel. 

It may very well bring you back home to what you do, not just competently, but masterfully.

A case in point: Before he directed the drama Interiors, Woody Allen spent a decade mastering popular low-comedy films like Take the Money and Run and Sleepers. While loathed by critics (The New Yorker called it an "achievement of suffocating emptiness"), Interiors was immediately followed by 38 years of award-winning comedies.