Coloring Outside the Lines. Jeff Tobe

peer but, more important, feedback from the marketplace. There are those who choose to ignore this symptom because they are so married to the success of the idea that they are unable to process the feedback of the marketplace when it doesn’t work. Because we live in a ‘customer service oriented environment’, I think that this symptom has changed. We MUST respond to our customers’ feedback BUT we also have to consider how QUICKLY you respond. It can be something as simple as “How quickly do you return my call when I leave a message on your voice mail?”

       #6 Expertitis

      This occurs when you know so much about one area nobody can teach you anything new. You become convinced that all the ideas in that area or field have been invented so you might as well not think of any more.

      There was a man in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office who, in 1899 went on a crusade to close the Patent and Trademark Office. He believed everything that was going to be invented had already been invented. Then he proceeded to ride home on his horse!

       #7 Failure-Phobia

      This is the fear of making mistakes. In his book Surviving On Chaos, Tom Peters talks about how “successful businesses are those who can fail fast and often”. Although most people are afraid of making mistakes, you can never learn anything without making them? Most people are not comfortable with the idea of making mistakes—of failing. Mistakes are a necessary byproduct of the whole creative process. Mistakes are opportunities for learning.

       The Cure

      There are 5 steps to curing this syndrome…to seeing your Harvey…to seeing the invisible…to seeing what others are unable to see. These 5 steps may seem very basic to you at first but, as any professional athlete—any Olympian—would quickly remind you, victory often comes from sticking to the basics.

       #1 Learn to See the World Through Your Client’s Eyes

      I would like to relate a story to you that illustrates this better than I could on my own. It’s from a book that many people have forgotten—written in the 1950’s by G. Lyn Sumner—called HOW I LEARNED THE SECRETS OF SUCCESS IN ADVERTISING. He tells a story that perfectly illustrates how important it is to see the world through your client’s eyes. As I share this, think about how you can associate this to your business:

       “It makes no difference whether you are using a full page ad in a magazine or a 5 line classified, it is not the space but what you say in that space that determines the success of that advertisement. Let me give you an example: Our maid had left us and as was the custom in Scranton Pennsylvania, Mrs. Sumner resorted to the method that everyone used to get another one. She called up the Scranton Times, an afternoon paper and asked that the following advertisement be inserted in the classified section under HELP WANTED—FEMALE.

       “WANTED—Girl for general housework.

       727 North Irving Avenue.”

       The ad ran for 3 days and nothing happened. It was repeated for 3 days more and when still nobody answered it, I made the suggestion that possibly the copy was at fault. Mrs. Sumner said, “All right. You’re an advertising writer. If you’re so smart, suppose you see what you can do.

       I was very professional in my approach. I said it’s easy to understand. Here’s a solid column of Want Ads all reading the same:

       ‘WANTED..MAID FOR GENERAL HOUSE WORK’.

       Suppose there is a maid in all of Scranton, who wants a position or wants to change her position, which one of these ads is she going to read?

       Now, let us put ourselves in the position of the maid herself. Every client has some fault to find with the work we are doing. Every maid has some fault to find with her place of employment. And she has in her mind, her own conception of the ideal place in which to work as every client has in their mind their own perception of their own solution to their own problems.

       Let us present our home and all of it’s attractiveness in terms of those selling points that will appeal to her. So, I prepared a piece of copy that read like this…

       “WANTED…girl to do general housework in small, new home in quiet, attractive hill section. All hardwood floors—easy to keep clean. No washing. No furnace to take care of. Nobody sick. Large airy maid’s room. House convenient to 2 bus lines. Small family. Good wages. 727 North Irving Avenue.”

      We placed that advertisement in the Times on a Thursday when most maids have the afternoon off. The first edition went on the stands at 1:00. By 3, the line of applicants had begun to form on our front porch. By 4, buses were erupting maids in groups at our corner. By 5, Mrs. Sumner had made a selection and the appointed one was happily at work in the kitchen a few minutes later getting dinner.

       When I came home I got the full story and I proceeded to analyze it. “You see,” I explained, “this afternoon dozens of maids, dissatisfied with their jobs read that column of classifieds. And what did they find? They discovered the perfect place to work. The kind of place they’d been thinking and dreaming about.”

       The trouble was that I didn’t let it go at that. Next morning, I went down to the office and told one of the men there what had happened. He looked at me hungrily, “Man! We’ve been without a maid for two weeks. I wish you’d write an ad for us”. I told him that if he would just give me the specifications of his home as a maid’s paradise, I’d be happy to. He gave them to me and, of course, by this time I was getting better at this sort of thing. I wrote an advertisement and he put it in the Times the next day.

       What do you suppose happened?

       Our maid went down and applied for the job!

      This story does a great job of illustrating the power of looking at the world through our client’s eyes. As basic as this sounds, most of us do not do it! Most of us have no idea of how our customers perceive us, our product or our service. Every morning, take one minute by yourself and imagine you are one of your clients about to do business with you that day. What do they think of when they think of doing business with you?

      Do they associate doing business with you as a pain or a pleasure? Are you just another vendor or employee? Are you a valuable, problem-solving resource on whom they can rely? Are you professional? And the key is to do this for each individual client and put yourself in their shoes.

       #2 Understand and Embrace Your New Roles in a New World

      Almost five hundred years ago, William Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage. All the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and each in his time plays many parts.” Many of us have been playing our ‘roles’ far too long and in order to create the future, we must re-write our script. I’ve identified five roles in my one-act play we call the future: one is the lead role and the other four are supporting roles. You must take on these roles in your profession if you are to be more successful. The four supporting roles are as follows:

      1. Challenge solver. You no longer sell product or services. You solve your clients’ challenges. You sell an experience. You look for challenges then find different ways to solve them

      2. Solution broker. In other words, you provide solutions. These may be solutions outside your normal realm. Your clients turn to you in this role because of trust and loyalty and they turn to you first.

      3. Educator or information provider. With the speed of change, our clients—both internal and external---need to be educated. You can be an invaluable resource for your clients by positioning yourself as an educator and an information provider. The discount clothing retailer Syms, has a great motto by which we should conduct business: An educated consumer is our best customer!

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