Some marketing messages just hit you between the eyes.

I was in Philidelphia’s Reading Terminal Market to discover the delights of the famous philly cheesesteak, so the sign in the picture had me straight away.

“Pizza & Cheesesteaks” is the simplest kind of marketing message, relying on the idea that if you want a pizza or a cheesesteak, and you want it now, you should stop wasting your time and buy it here. It’s a straight forward tactic that worked pretty well for the cheesesteak that day and for commodity products any day.

But what if your product is a bit more complicated than fast and cheesy food?

Leading a team that wants to skip to market with a reputation for great products means weaving four simple ideas into every part of your go-to-market thinking. The first two often get lost under the heading of marketing — remember the old saying though, marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department — the second two are pure product development, but all four are built from the ground up.

Simple Description

What is in the box? The idea here is to give your customers a simple way to describe what you have to offer, whether it’s cheesesteak, a micro-blogging platform or a jet engine.

If you’re struggling to work out what you’re selling, listen in to what your existing customers already call it. Don’t worry about trying to differentiate here — the in-the-box question isn’t supposed to turn up a unique answer, but a framing one.

Simple Value

Why would I buy it? If I’m in the market for what you sell AND you come up with a great reason to buy, you have a least half a chance of turning me into a customer.

So what’s the value, what will it do for me? Will you fill that huge sandwich shaped hole in my stomach, connect me to the world in less than a minute, haul an aeroplane full of paying passengers/cargo into the sky at the lowest cost per unit?

Of course, the best marketing messages are stuffed full of differentiated offers and compelling thoughts. Marketing communications people spend their day doing this but they sometimes lose sight of the true value. However persuasive the copy, and however sophisticated the message you have to get across, make sure you don’t obscure the simple description and simple value of what you have to offer.

The point of marketing is to ease a customer’s path to your door — good marketing means I’m more likely to try, and even persist with a product for a while — but the success of the product comes when I incorporate it into my daily life and tell my friends about it. And that means it better be simple to use too.

Simple to Use

Don’t make me work (too hard). Marketing may provide customers but the product lives or dies in the hands of the customer.

Any product that’s difficult to use risks a future covered in dust and destroys almost all chance of positive word-of-mouth. Products should be as intuitive as possible but the creators are usually the worst judges — so get out of the building, talk to customers, test, test, test, and then act on the results.

Simple to Extract the Value

Help me be successful. Ultimately, you have to deliver the value you promise. You’re not selling widgets, you’re selling what the widgets can do for the customer.

Send your customers on an unsupported voyage of discovery and they might get to the promised land but more likely they’ll bob around on rough seas. Build a support network around your customers that helps them get exactly the result they wanted when they dipped into their wallet.

The Ultimate Benefit

Of the four simple things, the ultimate customer benefit is obviously the value that they extract. Great products, reputations, and word-of-mouth, are all built when customer do things more quickly, more easily, more cheaply, or just better than before.

The ultimate benefit means success all round.

The success of my cheesesteak? My stomach complained but my face was smiling.

I’ve been lucky to spend the last few years working with people who want to find a better way of building products and companies they can be proud of.

It’s been quite a school yard with hundreds of meetings, workshops, lunches and late night debates.

This manifesto is the result. You can DOWNLOAD IT HERE as a Free PDF.

I’ve tried to sum up how you can use clarity and cohesion to build teams, companies, products and services, and how to get everybody working together for a common cause.

It’s for anyone with the ambition to skip to market. That is, it’s for leaders and managers in start-ups, established companies, charities, not-for-profits and anyone else interested in bringing out the talent, energy and enthusiasm of their people so that together they can do something extraordinary.

A few things you’ll get out of reading it:

• Why customers love some products and some companies
• Where companies go wrong and what to do about it
• A common cause of success or failure of a company
• What organisations actually look like
• The wavelengths-of-change that affect how companies evolve
• A framework for working beneath the surface of your business

Whether you like it and find it helpful or hate it with a passion, please let me know. You can add comments below, send me an email, Tweet me @sn1ck or just put a message in a bottle and hope for the best.

If you do find it useful though, please spread the word in every way you can think of.

DOWNLOAD THE MANIFESTO HERE and don’t forget to skip.

A little bit lost in Maryland this summer, my family and I came across Glen Echo Park, a once popular destination that’s seen hard times and is on the way back through the involvement of a dedicated not-for-profit tribe of volunteers.

Most of our visit was spent at the carousel where I was smitten with Smarty Jones. Mmmh, mmh that’s a handsome looking horse – if I’d have been riding I’d have taken Smarty for a trot for sure.

But for the whole time we were at the park, not one child rode Smarty.

What’s wrong?

Why don’t some customers buy your product? If it’s anything like Smarty, it’s great: accessible, goes up and down, has all the features, stands out in a crowd, it’s super-shiny for goodness sakes.

So why does the turkey get a ride whilst good ol’ Smarty puts on a brave face?

It’s the kind of question I get asked all the time. “We have a great product, but there something wrong. What is it?”

Whilst every product has it’s own story, the tale is put together the same way every time — and anyone can do it.

Ask your customers

Act like a consultant and ask your customers. You’ll learn more from what goes wrong than what goes right so make sure to ask non-customers who’ve made an active choice not to buy, and actual-customers who’ve bought but have stopped using. Get out of the building and ask the people who know. Visit, lunch, interview, test, survey — whatever it takes to get the information you need.

Speak to enough customers to see patterns; some will point to lack of priority or urgency, others may point to weaknesses in your product or your proposition. Assume nothing, test everything. When you’re pretty sure you know what’s going on, it’s time to act on what you’ve found.

What are you going to do about it?

There are three layers where you might need to fix things inside the building:

• Message problems are easiest and cheapest to solve. Get together with your sales and marketing team and change your presentations, messaging, communications. Use A/B testing to see what changes work best — especially if you’re web based and have a lot of passing trade.
• Go-to-market problems are more strategic and will probably force a new look at your market, features, distribution, pricing and positioning choices. Everything in this layer is connected so be suspicious of anything that looks like a silver bullet.
• A weak or ill defined core proposition means a fundamental rethink and the discomfort of living with your current product whilst working back through first principles.

After two interviews (my own children, 40% of the carousel kids that day) it was pretty easy to work out Smarty’s problem. Too much competition and a very small market. Strategic problems with no answer in sight means old Jones could be racing to retirement.

What about you? Can you change priorities and raise urgency or do you have to go a little deeper?

What happens when prospects don’t say Yes and won’t say No?

A Maybe is a hole in time. Complex products live with decision cycles that can last longer than a dying star. Entire companies have disappeared into Maybe shaped black holes. Listen carefully and you can hear them screaming “Just one more meeting, and I think we’re theeerrrreeeee…” as they fall across the event horizon.

It’s not always a problem. In a must-win, absolutely-no-choice, do-whatever-it-takes-to-keep-the-lines-open, a Maybe is the bread of life. If you’re operating bespoke — a new kind running shoe specially made for Paula, say — then you’re mission bound to keep the door cracked open.

Sometimes a Maybe isn’t even on the cards; it’s a Yes or a No, period. Simple products, the kind that leap to a decision in a single meeting, shouldn’t be a problem. Assuming you have good products and give good meeting, you’ll walk away with a Yes often enough.

I always prefer a Yes, but what if the choice is between a No and a Maybe?

What’s wrong with chasing rabbits?

Problem is, a Maybe sounds so possible — (just one more meeting). The more well funded you are the more likely you’re able to chase all these rabbits. The less well funded you are the more likely you’ll feel you have to. But as the saying goes, chase two rabbits and they both escape. Don’t confuse busy-ness with progress and don’t be seduced into endless streams of meeting-email-meeting-email-meeting, with your entire sales pipeline sitting at 75% probability.

Here’s the way I see it:

• Major sales take time and multiple meetings
• There aren’t enough resources to go the distance with every Maybe
• Use first meetings to find champions and ask for what you need

Let me explain.

Major sales are complex. New products are an untried cocktail of opportunities, costs and risks that force buyers to sit on fences for as long as it takes. Assuming your product shows promise and you make a decent fist of telling your story, it’s likely you’ll have no shortage of possible customers who are balanced on their fence whilst they “continue” talking to you.

Too many continuations and not enough progress saps the time, energy and finances of any team. The trick to maximising the effectiveness of all three resources is to focus on the “probable” customers and let the “possible” customers wait until they, or you, are warmer.

Find your champion

In other words, only dig wells where you’re sure there’s oil. Sadly, you can’t KNOW where to set up camp, but you can look for the single feature that marks out high potential territory; the presence of an identified champion inside the customer organisation. Not a point man or sponsor who simply arranges meetings for you, a champion is someone who sees the potential of your product, who pushes for progress and fights the good fight inside their own company.

Ask for what you need

How do you find these people? If you’re getting that Maybe feeling at the end of a sales meeting, do what you can to push for a Yes or No. The quickest way is to tell the truth and ask for what you need, “As you can see, we’re a new company and this is our first product. We’re fully committed but we know we’re not right for everybody at this stage. We’re looking for visionaries who can see the potential of what we’re doing and who want to work with us.”

Or, “So, we’re a small company that’s looking to expand by working with some new customers. We’ve had a good discussion today and I get the feeling you’re interested. What are the next steps that will progress our working together and who should we work with?”

Or … something else.

The idea here is to drive for a “Yes, we want to make progress, it will work like this…” or a straight “No thank you” as quickly as possible.

The more open you are about what you need, the more likely you’ll spend your time with probable, rather than just possible, customers.

Is this crazy? Maybe you should do everything possible to keep all prospects warm? Never giving an opportunity to say No? What do you think?

In the last five years I’ve run well over 6000 miles in marathon training. Over that period I’ve been completely sidelined with injuries for over 30 weeks and have run with niggling problems for maybe a third of the time.

There are two things I should point out about that last paragraph: motivation is not a problem, I run every day it’s remotely possible; and, these kind of stats are not unusual for a marathon runner.

Over those five years I’ve used 16 pairs of running shoes and a set of specially made orthotic insoles. Without going in to the glorious marketing-speak of individual running shoe models it’s a fair assumption that my equipment choices have made running easier and less stressful on my body. Right? Or, without all those shoes I’d be injured even more. Right?

Maybe not.

Over the summer I read Christopher McDougall’s book, Born to Run, which promotes the idea that humans have evolved to run, and running shoes aren’t good for us. Apparently:

“there’s no evidence that running shoes are any help at all in injury prevention. In a 2008 research paper for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed that there are no evidence-based studies — not one — that demonstrate that running shoes make you less prone to injury.”

My assumption: I need running shoes. The reality: I don’t need running shoes.

Everything I thought I knew is wrong.

What assumptions do you have, impacting your organisational life every day, that stand on no evidence?

The Science of Motivation

Here’s a possible example. In his recent TED Talk on the Surprising Science of Motivation Dan Pink highlighted the ineffectiveness of extrinsic motivators, such as bonuses, most of the time. Despite much of this research being 50 years old, many (most?) managers still rely on the wrong headed ideas of how to get things done.

The key lesson:

“There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does […] If we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks we can strengthen our businesses […] and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world.”

What to do when everything you know is wrong

So much for running shoes and extrinsic motivators. What do you do when something comes along that challenges your assumptions? Instinct may be to turn away and go back to the devil you know. Try this instead:

Stop – just think about it for a moment, is it even remotely possible that what has always seemed true, is maybe not the whole truth? Does this new thing nudge up against problem that just seems a part of the woodwork? Be open to possibility.

Look – dig into the the data. Strip away all the personality of the issue, what does the cold steel of a few facts show you?

Listen – who else is talking about this? Can you trust them? Ignore the doomsayers, trolls, the collapsoconomists and anyone with a vested interest in the status quo. Somebody, somewhere is looking at the edges of this thing. Find them.

Listen again – this time to your gut.

If you do all this and the world looks different … act.

My running world looks different. I’ve ditched the shoes for now. I’m not running marathons barefoot yet (although some people do) and I’ve had to make friends with a my blisters, but I am running again. And funnily enough … I feel stronger.

Image copyright: ericajoy via Flickr

Everything I’ve ever heard about Zappos has reinforced my belief that skippiness is good for business. Following this week’s news that Amazon.com has agreed to buy Zappos in a deal that tops $900 million, I’m surer than ever.

Feel-good employment

Under the heading of Success Stories, Inc magazine says,

Zappos, the online shoe retailer that has won renown for its stellar customer service and feel-good employment practices, announced that it was selling itself to Amazon.com.

The article goes on to reference a letter sent to employees by CEO Tony Hsieh, saying,

that although Zappos would be a part of a larger company, it would preserve its quirky culture that focuses on keeping workers happy.

Reading that, and being a little biased about this kind of thing, I see a simple skippiness formula:

(products people want)+(“stellar customer service”)+(“feel-good
employment practices” that “focuses on keeping workers happy”)
=very happy owners.

I don’t mistake a simple formula for an easy formula. Each part is hard work in itself and pulling the whole thing together, consistently, over enough time to build a significant business takes more focus, clarity, commitment and discipline than most leaders can muster. But when it does come together, the editors of Inc pay compliments and investors pay far more than just their attention.

The thing that bothers me is, why don’t more businesses try?

Glad to be involved

Is it because it’s not easy? Maybe, but it has to be worth the effort.

Owning/running/working in a place like Zappos must be better than the opposite – a business that offers products people don’t want, with grudging service and feel-bad employment practices that make workers unhappy. I don’t believe anyone goes in to business or takes a job intending to make it like that. It just kinda happens, especially when leaders are concerned with the pursuit of money as an end in itself.

Running a business in the pursuit of skippiness takes an alternative perspective. It’s the idea that businesses should be started and run with the explicit objective of making customers, staff and owners all glad of their involvement.

This week Zappos “powered by service” proved beyond doubt that if you do a good job, all kinds of money will flow.

Image copyright: kurtphoto via Flickr

It’s been three months since I wrote my first post for Shearing Layers and threw it into WordPress. I guess like most new bloggers I’ve found it an exciting, miserable, nerve wracking, delightful, low, high, skippy experience.

A big thank you to everyone who’s said things about Shearing Layers, given me feedback, and sent such interesting people my way.

Here are the most popular posts:

Bringing products to market

• How to build a financial model
• Get out of the building
• A short cut to the short list
• How to get ready for market
• How to write a plan
• Is the back end bomb proof?
• Making promises
• Ice cream and how to deal with entrepreneur’s risks

Managing

• How do you decide what to do
• What do all those people do?
• Everyone speaks
• A little help from your friends
• Hire on attitude
• Let the driver do his job

Some of these posts also make it to a series I’m building on the shearing layers themselves:

• How to build a financial model
• What do all those people do?
• How to get ready for market
• Making promises

With three months under my belt I’ve finally bitten the Twitter bullet, please follow me @sn1ck.

Here’s to another three months.

If you like what you find here please subscribe to the RSS feed for a little slice of Layers cake whenever it’s on the table.

I have a Jura coffee machine at home. I bought it because I love coffee and the Jura is a fantastic machine that makes GREAT coffee that is consistently, wonderfully, perfect.

When I turn the Jura on, it goes through a little routine that heats the water and cleans things out. It takes about 45 seconds. And then, it is … ready. I don’t have to guess. I didn’t have to read the manual to discover that readiness follows the heating-rinsing routine. The machine tells me. The little LED display goes from Heating, to Rinsing, to Ready.

And every morning I think – as I press the button and breathe deep – wouldn’t it be lovely if everything was so well behaved, and told you when it was ready for action. The idea, the plan, the presentation, the product, the team, the soufflé.

Sometimes it’s obvious. Most of the time, not.

Take the guesswork out. Test. Get out of the building, and test.

Put together your best version of the answer. Take it on the road. Talk and listen. Test.

What do you think? Is it ever too soon to test?

Image copyright: captainmcdan via Flickr

Image copyright: pipiwildhead! via Flickr

At its simplest, life comes down to a series of choices, or more often, a parallel of choices.

After deciding which new market or new product to go for, two types of choice dominate the day to day: how should we prioritise our time? and, should we go with option A or option B (or C, D, E, or F)?

This is no time to sway back and forth. You have to make decisions.

How do you decide what to do?

As I was looking in to this I came across a speech given by YCombinator founder Paul Graham at the StartupSchool2008 conference last year, he dealt specifically with the “how do you decide” question. His answer?

Do whatever is best for your users. You can hold on to that like a rope in a hurricane and it will save you if anything can. You can pull on that rope and it will guide you through everything you have to do. Figure out what they want, make them happy doing more of that.

Is he right? Absoloodle! Any choices that are best for customers tend to be pretty good for getting customers too. And customers make everything else possible.

If I could though, I’d add “in the long term” to the end of Mr Graham’s sentence. Running any kind of sustainable business, especially one that skips, is about winning in the long term. So doing whatever in the long term is best for your customers feels better to me.

Whether you’re prioritising time or choosing a fork in the road, put the customer front and centre, think long term, and swallow the results.

When I went to see Jack Welch speak on management, I knew what I’d be getting – candour, leadership, persistence, values – no need to explain, no sales pitch required. You had me at the name.

When I’m looking for a coffee and comfort in an unfamiliar town, finding a Starbucks makes me smile.

A brand that I know, like and trust is a short cut to the top of my short list – very often, it’s a shortlist of one. Nothing new there, brands are important, let’s move on.

If brands are important, how do I get one? How to build a reputation people trust?

Make a promise people care about – or, put another way, build a fantastic product that people want. I know that sounds so obvious that it’s hardly worth the pixels it’s displayed upon but a) there’s loads of rubbish out there, and b) there’s plenty of products, particularly technology products, that nobody wants or cares about.

Tell them you exist, in a language they understand – or, put another way, talk like you care about the customer rather than about yourself. The language you use to talk about your thing internally may be the same language that your customer uses externally, but it’s probably not. Use customer language, not marketing/management/leading/essential speak.

Deliver, deliver, deliver – or, put another way, fulfil your promises. We buy from people we trust, prove you deserve it and we’ll buy again and tell our friends.

Reputations are built around happy customers. Customers are happy when we do what we say we’re going to do, and we do it brilliantly.