If your goal is to bring people to your website, don’t immediately ask them to leave

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

An interesting trend I’ve noticed over the last few years is for websites to include links to their social media platforms at the very top of the site. It seems counter-productive to work hard to bring users to your website, only to immediately ask them to go off to Facebook or Instagram instead.

There are some cases where this makes sense. An example is a client of ours that is in the early planning stages of building a community of homes, so they’re trying to generate interest. Getting people to the site is great, but just getting them to follow on social media is awesome as well.

For the most part, though, including those links at the very top of your site is foolish.

If you’re writing content for SEO purposes, you’re trying to attract people to your site.

If you’re sharing great content on social media, you’re trying to attract people to your site.

If you put out a great email campaign, you’re trying to attract people to your site.

If you’re paying for ads on Google or via social media, you’re trying to attract people to your site.

When they arrive, don’t encourage them to leave right away!

We share this image with our clients to show our overall approach — build a fantastic site, and then work to attract people to visit and eventually convert.

The last sentence was key; with a “fantastic” website. If your website is subpar, then perhaps letting people dance around the edges is ok for now. When you really get serious, though, driving people to your site is often the best way to get them to become a new customer, so you should work to keep them there to discover how perfectly your services will fit their needs.

Social media is important for most businesses, and you shouldn’t hide your links. In fact, we include prominent links to social media in the footers of most websites that we build. If someone is intentionally trying to find your company on social media, by all means let them find you as it can be a great way to connect.

Just don’t start by pushing them off your site before they’ve had to chance to even dig in.

What is the opposite of friction?

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

One of the things that have made the Savannah Bananas baseball team so popular (as shared in the book “Banana Ball“) was very simple — remove as much friction as possible from baseball.

From the book:

“Here’s what I don’t understand about many businesses. Why do they continually do the things that their customers hate? Why are people endlessly put on hold, while a message plays that tells them how “important” their call is, but they do a slow burn while waiting to talk to an actual human being . . . and maybe they still hang up in frustration? In the Bananas’ organization, we have a word for this—friction. We looked at all the friction points from a baseball experience— ticket fees, price gouging on parking and concessions, as well as limited access to autographs and fan photos with their favorite players—and we did the opposite.”

We can all relate to the first part of that (“endlessly put on hold”), but rarely see the second. Even venues that are very fan-friendly, like Mercedes-Benz Stadium here in Atlanta, aren’t as fan-friendly as the Bananas. They’ve taken it to a whole new level.

What friction is in your business that can be eliminated? I see it in two areas:

  • Internal friction, like too many meetings, cumbersome software, poor communication, etc.
  • Client friction, which is many of the same things but they show up for your clients instead of your team.

If we can reduce internal friction to free up our time, and then help our clients do the same with their marketing, it’s tough to beat. It’s easier said than done, and there’s no magic bullet, but by slowly chipping away at the friction you’ll see things continue to improve forever.

Communicate one thing

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Attention is a scare resource, so when someone is willing to give you their attention it’s wise to make good use of it. The Founders podcast recently released a fantastic episode that dug into this, and I encourage you to check it out.

The main idea is that while it can be tempting to unload everything that you want to share, the more you share the less likely that the other person will remember any of it. If you share one thing, they’ll likely remember that one thing. If you share six things, they’ll likely remember none of them.

Steve Jobs was fanatical about simplicity, and always pushed to keep communication simple. This simple communication matters for your audience, but it also matters for your team.

If you’re running an ad or a marketing campaign, you need to tell people the one main thing that you want them to know.

If you’re talking to an internal team, the same thing applies.

In both cases you likely want to share a ton of thoughts and ideas; new products, new features, new problems to solve, and more. To the extent that you can boil it down to the main thing to focus on right now, the more successful you’ll be in both arenas.

Money comes naturally as the result of service

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

It can feel counter-intuitive at first, but when a company focuses on service over revenue they likely earn even more money than if they had flipped that.

Back in 1997 when Barnes & Noble seemed to be catching up to Amazon, Jeff Bezos gave a talk to his company to make sure they were focused on the right thing, saying in part:

“Look, you know, it’s OK to be afraid, but don’t be afraid of our competitors, because they’re never going to send us any money. Be afraid of our customers. And if we just stay focused on them, instead of obsessing over this big competitor that we just got, we’ll be fine.”

At the end of the day, you can choose to obsess about your competitors or obsess about your customers, and one of those will have a far better outcome than the other.

When building Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford was equally obsessed with his customers and put them ahead of profit, famously saying that “money comes naturally as the result of service.”

This can certainly be taken too far; if you lose money on every customer, you’re going to go out of business. Generally speaking, though, if you obsess on giving the best possible service to your customers, the money will take care of itself.

It takes a lot of effort to look effortless

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We see it in all walks of life — people that make things look effortless. This could be someone giving a talk, an athlete, a musician, or any number of others. They all have one thing in common: they put in a lot of effort to make things look effortless.

In a recent episode of the Founders podcast that was focused on Steve Jobs, they covered a bit about why his presentations were always so amazing. Part of it was the amazing products that they unveiled, part of it was the simplicity of the slides, but a big part of it was preparation. They say that for every hour that you will be presenting, you should spend 90 hours preparing, and Steve Jobs almost certainly hit that mark. His time in preparation made the talk seem effortless.

I saw this for myself recently when I saw Kevin Paul Scott giving a talk. The room was set up in such a way that the screen was behind him and he had no monitor or any notes in front of him. Despite that, he repeatedly would click to the next slide and read a quote word-for-word without even glancing at the screen. Was this magic? It kind of felt like it, but we all know that it was preparation. He had practiced this presentation dozens (hundreds?) of times, and as a result he just made it look simple.

I see this when I golf with folks, too. I’m not a particularly good golfers, but it’s frustrating because great golfers make it look super easy. They just walk up the ball, give it a smooth, easy swing, and it goes pretty much exactly where they intended.

In the business world, Apple is the king of this. Their products are generally the easiest to use, but also are some of the most powerful. That combination is incredibly difficult to pull off, but they make it seem effortless.

Lastly, this points back to the idea of “calling someone talented is an insult“. In most cases it’s not “talent” that you’re talking about, but rather “skill” — and skill comes from practice. If someone is very good at what they do they likely have a bit of natural talent in there, but it’s combined with a huge amount of practice. From there, it seems like what they do is effortless.

Work-life balance versus simple tolerance

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Work-life balance is one of those things that can be interpreted in many different ways. Generally speaking, I find that balance not to be in a perfect 9-5, 50/50 kind of way, but in balancing the various parts of your life as needed.

Last year I shared Rory Vaden’s thought on this, where he said:

“Balance shouldn’t mean equal time spent on equal activities. Balance should mean appropriate time spent on critical priorities.”

More specifically, I find the idea of “intentional imbalance” to be a great way to live, where you build your day around the things you need to get done, which might mean your work day isn’t 9-5, but is instead it’s more like 8-10, 12-4, and 6-8. Whatever works best for you is generally the right way to do it.

In a recent podcast episode from GaryVee, he attacked the traditional 9-5 workday even harder, saying:

“Work-life balance to me is happiness on all equations.

When I hear my friends or acquaintances or people in social media say things like, I worked nine to five Monday through Friday. I had great work-life balance. And you ask them, do you like your job? No, no, no, I don’t like it at all.

I’m like, you don’t have work-life balance. You have 40 hours a week every week that you hate. That’s not balance, that’s tolerance.”

There are times in life when we all need to tolerate the work that we do, but hopefully it’s been short-lived for all of you. I worked at Hardee’s for a little while in my teens, and it was an awful job, but it’s what I had to do until I could find a job that was more fulfilling.

If you work 9-5 at a job that you hate, that’s a tough thing to try to “balance”. The more you can find a role that aligns with your strengths and desires, the more the balance can become intertwined with your day in a way that leads to Gary’s idea of “happiness on all equations”.

Productivity versus activity

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

An interesting article recently came out about Wells Fargo firing more than a dozen employees who were faking their work. From the article:

“The staffers, all in the firm’s wealth- and investment-management unit, were “discharged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work,” according to disclosures filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.“

While those employees deserved to be fired, it makes me question Wells Fargo even more. How is it that they didn’t notice that work wasn’t be completed, and only found these people after (presumably) the IT department was able to detect the tools being used to fake the work?

As I was digging into this a bit more, I found a couple of comments on Reddit that summarized it quite well.

  • Good managers measure productivity. Shitty managers measure activity.
  • This is their metric for getting work done?? Mouse moving and keyboard taps? What kind of shitty company is this that doesn’t have a way of checking your work?

It makes me question a lot of what’s going on over there. As the second comment said, how does Wells Fargo not have a decent metric for actually tracking productivity?

This ties into a previous issue at Wells Fargo, where employees opened millions of fake accounts on behalf of their customers without authorization in order to meet sales goals from their superiors.

Goals or activity?

It seems to me that Wells Fargo previously had created goals for employees to hit, so employees did whatever they could to hit them (which is why measures are bad once they become a target). When that didn’t work out, Wells Fargo apparently gave up trying to track actual productivity and now just watch to see if their employee’s mouse and keyboard are active for a great enough period of the day.

Wells Fargo has over 200,000 employees, so I can’t begin to think of a way to properly motivate and understand what all of those people are doing. I would hope that the management structure would help keep an eye on things, but clearly that’s not working either.

This is by far my favorite thing about having a small team (there are nine of us as of this writing). I know roughly what people are working on, and we can all see what’s getting done and what gets missed. We don’t need to track their physical activity, and even if we did it would be of little value since I know a lot of our team references handwritten notes, lists, and sketches as part of their process.

Employees absolutely shouldn’t be using mouse jigglers and other tools to fake their activity, but if that’s the best measure you have for how much work is being done, that’s a far greater problem that needs to be addressed.

Personalized advice coming from noreply

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I’ve shared my distain for emails coming from “noreply” many times on this blog. My general feeling is that if a company wants to reach out to send me information, they should be willing to accept an email response back from me to dig in deeper. If the content they sent to me isn’t important enough to be worthy of a response, then why send it in the first place?

I’ve recently moved our GreenMellen CRM back to Pipedrive, and it’s a fantastic product. If you need a platform to help you track your leads and clients, it’s a good one to consider.

That said, they recently sent me an email encouraging me to “unlock Pipedrive’s potential with personalized advice”, and it came from a noreply address. Included in the message was the line “our team is genuinely enthusiastic about helping you get the most out of Pipedrive.“

No, they’re not.

They’re nice enough folks, and it’s a great product, but you can’t say you’re “genuinely enthusiastic about helping” while also sending an email with the implied message of “don’t email us back; you’re not important enough for us to spend time reading your message”.

It’s that simple. If you are honestly genuinely enthusiastic about helping, then do it. Actions speak louder than words, and denying an email reply is a pretty clear action.

Where Google’s downfall began

by 3 Comments

Reading Time: 2 minutes

While Google is clearly still a huge and impactful company, it appears things are heading in the wrong direction. If that’s true, it’s easy to point to where the slide began.

Back in 2018 Jeff Bezos told his employees that one day Amazon will fail. He’s not wrong, but his intent was inspiration to keep them on the right track. Going a bit deeper, here is the exact part of that talk that stood out to me:

“If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end. We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.”

That’s clearly where Google has failed. They focused on their customers for 20 years, but over the last five they’ve becoming heavily inward-focused. If you look at the four items on my recent post about why Google is failing, all of them are things that they’ve turned from customer benefits to internal money-saving.

On one hand, it’s understandable. Things get a little tighter, so you work to raise the bottom line a bit. The problem is that when you do things at the expense of your customers, you have no choice but to keep tightening things up and it becomes a death spiral.

Media Play

It reminds me of one of the last times I bought something from Media Play, probably 20 years ago. They were already fading, but they were clearly trying to squeeze every last bit they could. Upon checkout, the poor woman checking me out had to go through like 10 different up-sells (mailing list, membership, extra batteries, etc). It was super annoying, though I know she was only doing it because management required it. When a company starts getting desperate, you know they’re in trouble.

Google has sailed past the point of “start to focus on ourselves“, and I feel that it’s only going to get worse from here.

Bugging 24,990 people to make 10 sales

by 2 Comments

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’ve shared my disdain for cold email many times on here, and a recent video that I watched help to prove my point. Similar to how I follow both sides of political contests online, I also keep an eye on cold emailers spammers to see what their latest techniques are.

I was watching a video a few days ago where the creator was sharing some “great tips to create hundreds of fake email accounts to send out cold email“, and he included a spreadsheet on how many accounts you’d need to create. Here’s a snippet from the spreadsheet he shared.

The red arrows are mine. By his estimation, you’ll need to send out 25,000 spam emails every month in order to gain 10 new clients. To keep the business running for a year, 300,000 people would have to deal with their spam.

This shows the problem perfectly. He had literally nothing to say about those 25,000 people, other than how best to try to cheat the system and get emails into their inboxes. To him, that’s just the cost of doing business, but he’s putting the cost on the wrong people.

There is certainly a “cost of doing business” for everyone, but I wouldn’t dream of putting that burden on unsuspecting people that didn’t ask to be part of my sales process.

Thanks to new tools coming out and AI to help, spamming is going to continue to get easier but that never makes it acceptable.