I was on a conference call today, discussing marketing. Someone explained the benefits of their particular service to me. After the presentation was over, we began to discuss what I needed in my business. During this discussion, I talked for a few moments about what I was attempting to do and why.
The person on the other end of the call interrupted me and said, “What you should be doing is…” She then gave me a list of items that I needed to be communicated. This list kept growing the more she talked. My mind wandered at that point, I was focusing on this choice of words – you should be doing.
I started to think through this concept of what I should be doing. I hear this quite frequently. All day long, during sales meetings and conference calls, I hear people telling each other what they should be doing. Sometimes, this masquerades as “you need to,” but the meaning is the same. I am convinced that people throw these phrases around based on little actual evidence and with little understanding of the practical considerations of the person they are directing.
Contemplate what we were talking about on the call. I am trying to communicate a message to the potential customer. To be honest, what I am really trying to do is to get them to hire my firm instead of someone else. Many of us dance around that primary purpose as if our clients do not intrinsically get what we want them to buy from us. They know we are trying to sell them something, so dancing around the subject in person or in your marketing effort is really just a waste of time. I was being told a whole list of things I should try to communicate, but never once did I hear a discussion about what I wanted to communicate and what the client might want to hear.
Think about this. How many PowerPoint slides have you been through where you have the artistic title slide, the introduction to the company that has a mission and value statement, a company overview slide, and that slide with the long line chart that shows milestones of the company? Stop there. Who has ever been interested (other than maybe the investors) in a map of company milestones on their journey? The graph draws our attention, but the data put on these slides is meaningless. This slide is right up there with the standard 3-box display of “what we do” and the typical circle wheel labeled “Our Unique Process.” I have seen at least 2,000 slide presentations during business meetings in my lifetime. Almost all of them look the same. The same charts. The same content is usually even organized in the same way. In some cases, I even see the same stock photos. I think I will create a site called “Pictures of Group of Diverse People Looking Upwards toward the Horizon with a Look of Determination.” That is the stock photo of choice these days. I wonder if the photographer who took that picture knew that it would used in almost every boring sales meeting ever hosted.
So I should have a title slide. I should tell people what my name and title is. I should have a brief introduction to my company. I should show who the leadership is. I should have a history of the company , and key milestones, and a map of where all the offices are. I should do a lot of things, that no one will ever read and ever care to even look at.
Come to think about it, I have done a lot of things in my career that I was told I should do. You should have an end-of-the-year president’s club trip. You should have a purposeless, expensive meeting everyone travels to, which is called a QBR. I should have a weekly team meeting; I should respond to every email, and listen to every voicemail. I should have a mission statement and an about us page. My life is full of people explaining what I should be doing.
You know what? I think I am just about done with the should part of my life. I think I am going to stop doing what I should be doing and start doing what I want to do and, more importantly, doing what my clients want me to do. When I get aligned with what my client wants, then it is funny how fast business happens. I have spent way too much time trying to check the thousands of boxes of all the should statements. I think I will just skip to the back of the test, lay my pencil down and walk out the door and do what I want instead.
When I think of it, the most successful marketing campaigns that I have ever seen have always been just that. Avant-garde, deliberate, to the point, and simple.
We should be listening to our client’s needs and our employee’s needs not do random things because it pleases the investor or this thing that everyone must do etc. Moreover, our clients and employees need change constantly at each stage of the company’s growth and at each stage of the employee’s life so we should be checking at all times if we meet and exceed their needs.
Yes, the client comes first!