One overlooked bonus of keeping your marketing materials concise is that there are fewer opportunities for typos.

Also, know the difference between your average cost/value and your customer-specific cost/value.  Average cost/value is useful for planning and projecting.  But for management and strategy, you’ll want to know customer-specific cost and value.  Why?  Because then you can try to find more prospects that look like them, for the most profit (and probably the most fun).

As part of your marketing or demarketing analysis, these calculations should turn into what your sales team calls “qualifying criteria” for evaluating leads.  A sales team that isn’t obligated to qualify its leads is a sales team that’s going to cost you real money.  But sales teams aren’t usually the kind of folks who like to spend time on analysis.  If you’re the boss, or if you’re the marketing chief, you need to make these numbers happen.  Get to it!

Man, I hope these folks keep winning.

There are many famed quotes on the theme of “how much is enough”:

Lore has it that someone once asked Abraham Lincoln, “How long should a man’s legs be?” and that he answered “Long enough to reach the ground.” Einstein is credited for a quote something like, “Make everything [i.e. theories or models] as simple as possible, but no simpler.” And my 9th grade English teacher, Mrs. Eleanor Ponder, would say this about how long our essays should be: “like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover everything, but short enough to keep it interesting.”

At their worst, executives have a bias toward either shoot-from-the-hip decision making, or paralysis by analysis. Better off are those who know what level of confidence they need before they can make a decision, and what amount of data and analysis they need to get that level of confidence.

If you know you lean too far in one direction, make a point to ask of your partners (or engineer for yourself) a flag or alert when you need correcting action. Expect that it will take a few tries before the new habit sticks.

Mind you, it’s not like I did a McKinsey binder’s worth of data analysis. But after about twenty hours of sifting through trade journals, pulling data into spreadsheets (with a +/- 15% range of accuracy), I could tell them with 95% certainty that they could do 500% of their current business volume in the market space they were already living in. And that this market space was growing. And that they really ought to focus their growth energy on further penetration, instead of exploring new sectors.

Twenty hours. That’s all the data time it took to nail down the biggest strategic decision they were going to consider that year. They might have made the same decision without the data. Then again, they might have pushed hundreds of thousands of dollars of effort into an unnecessary chase after new business. Under these circumstances, twenty hours of data time sounds pretty cheap to me.

– Geoff Colvin in Ex-CEOs should learn from The Donald, Wall $treet Week, 13 May 2008.

I’ve been meaning to blog some version of the “if you owe the bank $x” line for some time, but this week’s W$W article gave me extra impetus.

The broader point for businesses and executives is that there are many ways for someone to hold you hostage.  Owing you too much is just one.  Customers can hold you hostage if you’re their biggest client.  Employees can hold you hostage if they’re the only ones who know how to do something essential for your business.  Neighbors can hold you hostage if they can make your block somehow unattractive to your customers.

You can’t make all these risks go away, but you sure ought to safeguard against the ones you can if they’re big and/or likely.

He recognizes that many problems are entrenched at UC. But that won’t deter him.

“There is a saying, ‘A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,’ and that is my view,” he said. “And my view is that some things we probably should have done 10 years, five years, 20 years ago may get done when you have a crisis.”

– Tanya Schevitz, San Francisco Chronicle in Next UC president - homey image, hefty mission, Thursday, May 8, 2008

So stop trying to perpetuate the idea that you don’t make mistakes. Nobody thinks that about you. And stop trying to be perfect. You’re not going to pull it off.

Instead, figure out how good you need to be, and shoot for being that good and a little bit better. Ask your staff and your customers to help you be better — by providing you with feedback on how well (or how poorly) you’ve done, and for providing suggestions on how you can do better. If you get good at this, you’ll find that life is much less stressful.*

Remember that being “good enough” isn’t always about scoring 90% every time you try. Sometimes it’s about scoring 100% nine times out of ten, and getting a goose egg on the last one. Learning to identify, acknowledge, and make amends for mistakes is a skill worth developing. And learning that skill is a much better use of your energy than trying to be perfect.

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*Especially if you’re a business owner.  People who own their own stores have a particularly hard time with this kind of thing.

When it comes to marketing my own business — letting good friends and colleagues know what I’m doing and what I want to be doing, and what’s different from what I used to be doing — I’ve clearly been falling down on the job. Talk about your cobbler whose kids have no shoes!

Step Number One — I’m adding “Marketing and Management Consulting” to my email signature.  Steps Two and Three will be to find some clearer words about what I want to do for my clients, and to actively spread the word. I’ll keep you posted on how this self-consult works…

How does a business serve its owner? Certainly, the business should make money.* Beyond that, the business should make the owner happy: through the nature of what it does, through the things it allows the entrepreneur to do with his or her time, through the daily experiences that the entrepreneur has while running the business.

Every economist understands that if a business doesn’t succeed in its obligation to serve customers, it’s not going to be in business for long. But not everyone remembers that if a business doesn’t succeed in its first obligation to serve the entrepreneur, there’s not much chance that it will keep serving its customers well, and there’s not much point trying.

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If the business doesn’t make money, then it isn’t a business, it’s a hobby.  Or at best, an unintentional “nonprofit organization”.