Don’t Make Me Work Hard to Give You Money

I’m always confused by how hard companies make it on consumers to buy their products, online, and in “meat space.”

Have you been to a Walmart or a Best Buy, lately? Good luck finding someone to help you with your purchase (or even finding what you want to buy, for that matter).

For enterprises, purchases are often as much an exercise in persistence and diplomacy, than they are a straightforward transaction, as you haggle with vendors, channel partners, and sales people.

But there are a few companies that absolutely understand the KISS principle.

Southwest Airlines makes it ridiculously easy to book and purchase online tickets. Dropcam sells their cool HD WiFi cameras in a very easy online process (plus, free 2 day shipping!). BlueJeans network sells their awesome Software-as-a-Service teleconferencing bridging service via a drop-dead simple “try if for 14 days free” online form. And it goes without saying how easy it is to purchase goods from Amazon.

In short, these companies “get” the brilliant concept that it should be drop-dead simple to acquire customers, and sell them goods and services that they want to buy – now.

When I hear of companies that are struggling with their sales, more often than not it has to do with their sales cycle, as much as it does their products.

In my first year as CIO at Hendrix, I had one national vendor that I kept trying to give business to (in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range), that I couldn’t seem to even get interested in taking a purchase order. They are now firing thousands of people – and I am in no way surprised; not because they didn’t take my money, but because they didn’t seem to understand how to take anyone’s money.

It’s not only large companies that have this difficulty. Startups usually suffer from this malady (with a few rare exceptions), altogether forgetting that the reason they exist is to (one day, at least) make money.

The solution for companies struggling with their sales cycle is really quite simple.

Make something great – and then make it ridiculously easy for customers to buy and begin loving your product or service, immediately, if not sooner.

Boiler Room Marketers – You’re Doing It Wrong

Boiler Room Marketers – you’re doing it wrong.

Yesterday, I received an email from someone claiming their company was the “#1 education property on the internet.”

Aside from checking my phone to make sure the year wasn’t 1999, I had a good chuckle imagining the copywriting genius it took to compose that gem. Strike one.

As I read further, this person invoked the name of my boss (the president of our college) and referenced a letter he had FedEx’d him (“wow – would you look at that – a Western Union Telegram!”), in order to elicit a sales call with me on their product. For those playing along at home, we call this “strike two.”

Examining the missive even closer, I noticed that there were two different font faces (and sizes) where the person had cut and pasted the boilerplate into the message, but forgot to correct the capital “U” (where he started to type “University”, but instead wrote “UCollege”). Strike three. Next batter, please.

Look – we all have jobs to do. It’s a never ending “arms race” to get past gate keepers, and in front of decision makers. I get it. We all get it.

Pulling cheap marketing stunts (a FedEx letter? Really?) isn’t the way to endear your way into a bona fide sales call.

And, if you’re gonna cut and paste some horrific copy, please make sure that you at least get our / my name right and the style matches.

But – and for me, most importantly – don’t claim a relationship with people in my organization that you obviously don’t have (and can be checked with a text, email, or call – which I always do when someone makes a claim of a prior relationship).

Spotting amateur hour is an occupational hazard in any managerial position. At the very least, make it look like you’re trying.

“We are no longer bound …

“We are no longer bound by four walls. We can have an engaged conversation with someone many hundreds or even thousands of miles away just as if they are sitting here at the podium,” says David Hinson, Executive Vice President at Hendrix College.

Story from KTHV in Litte Rock, on Jay Barth’s Political Parties and Elections class being conducted from the DNC.

This was conducted from one of the new HD Teleconference classrooms we equipped over the summer, in the Mills B auditorium of Hendrix College.

Rehashing The Academy

I was excited to see that The Chronicle of Higher Education had made the bold leap to publish a new e-Book, Rebooting the Academy.

And I was equally disappointed to see the result.

It’s not so much a reboot, as it is a rehash.

It could have been so much more.

From Amazon’s description for Rebooting the Academy:

Is higher-education the next bubble to burst? Plenty of people outside of academe think it’s an industry ripe for disruption and change. New approaches to teaching and research with digital tools are being tried that could be transformative to the future of higher education. Rebooting the Academy takes you inside a dozen of these ideas.

Left out of this description is the fact that the majority of the material contained within Rebooting the Academy is repurposed material, which previously appeared in The Chronicle. The remaining content is made up of articles and essays, previously published elsewhere, by the educators and innovators featured.

Is the content great? Sure. It was great the first time I read it. But now I pay $5 for the privilege of reading it again.

But, where’s the Reboot of the Reboot?

Robert Reid wrote in his book, Architects of the Web (Wiley; 2nd edition, February 8, 1999), of a phenomenon called “shooting the proscenium arch.”

Reid was referring to early filmmakers, who used a new technology – the motion picture camera – to film staged plays. It’s not that these early adopters weren’t innovative. They were simply inhibited by the thinking of their preceding technology matrix. They had yet to recognize the undiscovered universe of entertainment possibilities that the new medium enabled.

What those early adopters did was revolutionary for the time. But over the long haul, it wasn’t sufficient for creating a transformative new form.

In higher education, we’ve got to demolish the old proscenium in order to create a new stage.

The Chronicle of Higher Education leaping into electronic media in a significant way – utilizing Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple distribution channels – is a big deal. But it’s timid. Not transformative.

It’s like getting excited because my favorite book is now available on paper, papyrus, and parchment. The content is fundamentally the same. The channel is the only difference between the old technology and the new.

Important? Yes. Transformative? No. What could have been done differently?

Take the section on Khan Academy. Is it more impactful to read a description about how transformative a lesson created by Salman Khan is, or to experience a Khan Academy session, in situ, directly with an eBook? Why not embed one or more sample Khan Academy videos inside of a copy of Rebooting the Academy, and show – not tell – its impact? Killer, right?

Within the introduction of Rebooting the Academy, Jeffrey R. Young promises that “[you] will find not only the profiles as they originally appeared, but you’ll hear from the innovators in their own voices.” How much better would this work have been if we indeed were able to actually hear these innovative voices, audibly, through the inclusion of embedded sound? Again, Killer.

And why not have more than the handful of photos that do appear in the text, as received? We’re talking bits, not paper and ink, here… toss in a few more high resolution photos, perhaps a smattering of interactive photo galleries. I’m not calling for the end of the printed word – but employing a competent graphic designer makes the difference between a work that invites the learner into an engaging experience, rather than looking like precisely the same content that you consumed six months ago, from a printed predecessor.

Certainly, the computational capabilities of Nook, Kindle, and iBooks differ significantly, and many of these embedding capabilities cannot be accomplished uniformly across all of the platforms listed above, as they are currently offered to the public today. But examples – like the Flipboard family of mobile applications, or the Hendrix College Magazine (available for free on iTunes) – exist that can provide a roadmap for producing engaging experiences in consuming text, video, hyperlinks, social media, and audio on mobile devices.

We’re talking about rebooting the academy here. So. Let’s. Reboot. The. Academy.

And let’s reboot our conception of what constitutes an eBook. Why not dream big, if we’re to dream at all?

At least one of the profiled innovators agrees. Within the profile of Daniel J. Cohen of George Mason University, is a passage that reads:

[They] see the web as a place to distribute electronic copies of articles rather than as a platform that fosters new ways of thinking.

Substitute web with eBook in the passage above, and that does a fair job of encapsulating the deficiency I find in what is otherwise a tremendous first effort in Rebooting the Academy, the eBook.

If we are truly serious about transforming how our professors teach and how our students learn, we must do more than simply repackage our old articles and lectures.

We must become serious about acquiring the skills needed to produce compelling digital content, in its native milieu, from inception to execution.

We must apply care and reflection to the quality of our digital teaching, so that what comes of the process is compelling, consumable, and measurably advances learning and critical thinking.

We must sit down and re-imagine our traditional content and text from a wholly digital perspective, with a mindset attuned to an asynchronous model of consumption.

Simply finding yet another way to copy-and-paste our old libraries of PDF files, blog posts, and inline articles ad infinitum, isn’t going to win the hearts and minds of our once and future audience of digital learners.

We can’t Reboot the Academy if all we’re doing is Rehashing the Academy.

Burning the Ships

Cortez, during the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, was said to have burned his ships, so that there was no returning to the Old World – and ensured that his men were 100% invested in the success of their endeavor.

Daily, we read about the latest out-of-this-world valuation on some startup, from someone who isn’t a programmer, or has no formal business training, or has only a partial working brain in their head. Rarely do you hear of the level of commitment that those people have invested in to obtain their “overnight” successes.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t about going to cool parties, or hanging out to make a connection that will make or break you, or getting that killer round of Series A funding.

It’s about creating value where none existed before – and giving 100% of yourself toward reaching that goal.

When I started my company in 1996, my wife and I both quit our “day jobs” in the same week. I triple-booked business to ramp up. And worked my ass off 6 or 7 days a week until the checks started coming in. It wasn’t glamorous – but it was sustainable, and most importantly, profitable.

I wouldn’t have had the level of commitment to my enterprise if I hadn’t metaphorically “burned my ships” (i.e., quit my fallback, my day job).

If you think you’re ready to strike out and create the next Facebook, the next Instagram, the next Twitter, you have to be ready to scuttle the ties that are keeping you close the the shore, and head into the jungle.

Cause that’s where the gold is. Not on the beach.

You Have to Show Up

I had a friend some twenty years ago – I’ll call him Bill – who opened a small music store in Nashville, on Second Avenue (that was just becoming a revitalized tourist area at the time).

What should have been a glowing success (a music store, in the heart of Music City, USA) was instead a complete failure.

Within a year, he was out of business.

How did this happen?

Well, his business plan had two fatal flaws.

1. He sold only music he liked, and
2. He didn’t keep regular, predictable business hours.

It sounds simple enough, but simply, consistently, being available, every day, can make a tremendous difference between achieving great success in your business… or abysmally failing.

And not listening – or even pretending to listen when you do appear – just adds insult to injury.

If you’re not consistently present and engaged in your daily affairs, there is absolutely no way you can be affective with the constituencies that you’re trying to service.

Worse still, you signal that you don’t value the time, talents, and patronage of the people you need to succeed.

Show the people you want to influence that you do value them by showing up – on time, every time.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 50,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 19 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Business Etiquette DOES Matter – Revisited

This is a repost from last November; but is still as valid today as it was ten months ago:

I realize that people are being asked to “do more with less” these days.

That doesn’t mean that common courtesy and business etiquette are no longer required to do your jobs.

It’s more important now than ever before.

• It doesn’t cost anything to smile or be friendly.  It doesn’t cost anything to say “please” or “thank you.”
• For any business call, return the call in a reasonable period of time.  Twenty-four hours is reasonable.  A week is not.
• If you initiate a request for pricing and promise a return call, return the call when promised – especially if the answer is “no” so that you’re not dodging follow up calls.  It’s business – people hear “no” all the time.
• In the middle of a project, don’t go “dark” for weeks on end.  This applies to both ends of the vendor / client relationship.
• Do what you say you are going to do, when you say you’re going to do it, at the price you said you’d do the work for.
• Be a person.  Be accountable.  Corollary: Never, ever, say “it’s not my job.”

Maybe being polite is strictly a function of how we are raised as children.  Maybe it’s directly related to our work environment.  Maybe it’s a direct reflection of your “I-just-don’t-give-a-damn” threshold.

Whatever the case may be, being polite, accountable, and timely will set you apart.

Because for all of us making our way in the wilds of this Recession, doing business with courteous companies makes the difficult journey a little more bearable for all involved.

The Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes

You know the old saw.

“The Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes.“

Same’s been true with me and updating my own marketing material lately.

To correct that, I’ve been playing around with Animoto this week (http://www.animoto.com).

Verdict: Me like. Me like lots.

Anyway, here’s the result:

iPhone Apps

Android Apps

Blackberry Apps

We Need More Contact, Not More Connections

I have several thousand Facebook Friends and Twitter Followers.

I have a few hundred contacts on LinkedIn.

There are only a handful of any of these that are actually friends who would help me move furniture, or drop me off at an airport.

We have any number of ways to connect to people – social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), email, telephone, SMS, Skype, Chat, yada yada yada.

Few take the time to actually make meaningful contact.

I don’t mean a pitch – I mean, create a lasting, personal relationship with the people we titularly are “connected” to.

The past ten years have seen the transition from conducting business primarily in person to conducting business mostly with people we may never ever meet in person, face to face.  Over the past two years, the majority of my business has come from people I have never met in person, and may never get to meet.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing.  But I am saying that this loss of personal contact has caused us to be less effective communicators, rather than more effective.  Seems counterintuitive, what with all the “friends” we have.

In fact, I posit that the abundance of choice in the number of ways that we can communicate clouds our judgment over how we should communicate.

Sure – it’s funny when you see a cartoon about some dude doing the “crackberry prayer” at Thanksgiving Dinner.

Till YOU do it.

I received an email notification from an automated system this morning telling me that an app had failed a certification process.  The offending incident wasn’t actually a flaw in the application itself, but rather was a one-off issue with another service that it relied upon.  A two minute phone call would have adequately communicated this – and now, the basically identical software must be resubmitted to be tested again.

Sure – the communication mechanism served the person reviewing the software beautifully; it failed me miserably, and in the process has added two more weeks of lag time to the release of a new version of software.

All because it was too big of a pain in the ass for somebody to pick up the phone for a two minute call.

We need to make sure we are contacting and not merely connecting.