The Diner in my somewhat sleepy town is painfully empty.  It is as painfully empty as most any store or restaurant you walk by these days.  No doubt this change causes incredible stress to the owner of each business leaving them way too much time to consider all the extra things they could do to try to change their fortunes. We are all there or worried we will be there.

But let's turn those thoughts around.  How could you do LESS to change your fortunes?  Consider that people actually do NOT want more from you and would welcome you giving them an amazingly great and simple moment.  If there ever was a time that the saying "Longing for simpler times" rings true it is now. I hope that fact remains long after the recession is over.

So why can't that Diner end the stress that comes from maintaining that enormous menu that is trying to please everyone?  What if they just focused on making the PERFECT burger, fries and shake?  Every ounce of energy focused into a finite offering that will be extraordinary.

No more.  No less.

In the process, they will have reinvented their business.  They will have found a way to be different than their competitors.  They will have found a way to have people start talking about them again and spreading the word.  Not from that extra mailer or ugly banner with a "buy one get one free" offer.  Just connect to what people went to Diners for in simpler times and deliver it with perfection.

The Shake Shack in New York does just that and the lines run around the block....and back.

And it is true for every business.

What did "simpler times" in your industry look like?   What is the Burger, Fries and Shake of your industry? Of your specific business?  Are they the absolute best anyone could ever find?

Customer touch points. It is a concept that is often mentioned but rarely focused on as an opportunity for persistent innovation and impact.

Trying to consider the big question of "How do I improve our customer service/experience" winds up being too big a problem to solve so it often just gets bandaged or abandoned. Trying to tackle big picture questions triggers fear and anxiety. When that happens, progress comes to a halt leaving you to go back and focus on the ironically comfortable routine of solving customer complaints and fighting off competition.

But how about breaking down the initiative into bite size pieces that allow you to make a consistent series of small steps forward?

I propose that you write down every single customer "touch point" that exists in your business process. From initial phone call to payment of your invoice (Yes, the boring ones that you rarely think about but wind up being the main ways your customer/clients connect with you). If you don't have 10 then add some more until you do. Send a birthday card, call monthly or quarterly to ask how business is doing. Maybe an extra email confirmation or a newsletter. Just keep putting yourself in your customers seat and consider what would make each piece a memorable experience FOR THEM. Think about great experiences you have had and translate them back into your business. Ask your clients what interaction with your company is the most frustrating.

Now, here is the important part where you make a plan of action and make progress. What additional idea can you add to each touch point that would move it closer to perfect? Just a small step (change the way you answer the phone or a thank you note when an invoice is paid). Implement 1 change/innovation to each touch point every month and you will completely transform your customers experience within a year.

You may disagree but I don’t think you really get to understand your business till you know EXACTLY WHY you’re doing it. Knowing why is harder than it looks. Learning is expensive.

Making innovation work to grow your cash account comes from this education. Want to know why marketing and advertising creates buzz but doesn't = cash? Because it's not connected to what is real about your business. The REAL truth.

Not what gets attention... what keeps attention.

Why do I not look to simply sell boilerplate web sites or marketing ideas to Fortune 500 companies with large budgets? Just be a good salesmen and trial close them again and again until they buy? Yak yak yak. Blah blah blah.

Our work breathes the soul back into a business and its owner. Traditional agencies, PR firms, design firms, marketing firms and "consultants"  don’t do that even if you can afford them…  They just futz around a lot and try to fit your business into what they think works for others.  That does not celebrate what makes your particular business real and great.

What is far more interesting is persistently growing a business that helps you and those that work alongside you buy a home, raise good kids and share a full life with a loved one.  Business owners that "get" this core truth work hard to make that happen for other people (and themselves). They do "cool" and "new" stuff. They take smart risks. They are more powerful than the Larry Ellison's of this world.

My old logistics service business was good… very good in fact.  But I can’t say moving cargo around was exactly “making a dent in the universe” and it didn't make me excited for each day.  However, what I did do was provide a service for clients that generated revenue, that revenue paid those that also cared about the company and its clients and allowed them to learn, grow, test themselves, be challenged during the day and realize their personal dreams as they married, traveled, bought their first home and raised kind and inspired children.

That is a dent.

What is your business for?

From Tim Sanders "The Likeability Factor." In it, he paraphrases a line from Dale Carnegie's "How To Make Friends and Influence People"...

"You will win more friends in the next 2 months developing a sincere interest in 2 people than you will ever win in the next 2 years trying to get 2 people interested in you."

My version...

"You will win more new clients in the next 2 months developing a sincere interest in 2 prospects than you will ever win in the next 2 years trying to get 2 prospects interested in you."

Q: What if you approached (and targeted) each prospect because you were truly interested and fascinated by their business and/or the type of people they are?

How would that change your entire sales and marketing approach?

Are you fascinated by your clients and their business? If not, why not?

EXTRA CREDIT: Apply the same standard to your vendors/suppliers.

Almost every business I have come across sells in a similar way. Call, meeting, live presentation, written proposal, negotiate and... pray.

It's a tedious and painful process

I am certainly guilty of trying to follow the same path. Boy does it suck. If it sucks for one to do, how much must it suck for the
person on the receiving end?

If your sales strategy focuses on grinding the prospect into submission...you can't complain when your clients act like a captured populace.

What if every interaction with a prospect was a good experience for both of you? What if you had fun creating and delivering them? What would that look, feel and sound like?

Now....

What would your first meeting be like?
How fascinating a read would your bid response be?
What would your proposal look like?
What kind of live presentation would you give?

I am not talking about what your PR or Marketing company tells you it should look, read or sound like. What would be fun for you to prepare and present?

It's what the customer wants that counts, Follow your gut first, Markets are conversations, Customers don't know what they really want, It's about telling stories, Be your own client, Etc, etc...

If I grabbed 10 books off of my shelf I could find researched theses on each of the concepts listed above and many more.

I find myself wondering if the "new era" of marketing is quickly becoming the cluttered noise that it is hoping to rise above. The latest "Fad" based on a few case studies where a different approach proved successful.

It reminds me of similar cycles in food and fashion:

Carbs are good, carbs are bad, protein only, protein only is bad, etc..

Ties are wide, ties are narrow, no ties, ties are back, etc...

Is marketing evolving or is it merely moving in a fad like cycle in the same way diets and fashions move in and out of style?

Fad Marketing = Fad Diets = Fashion Trends

Advertising is not as dead as some would think, word of mouth is not the singular answer and blogs are not the only way to go forward.

For all the new ideas being presented in order to find the front edge of the envelope, it is worth noting that the timeless wisdom of the likes of Peter Drucker, Napoleon Hill and Nelson Rockefeller remain highly effective. Follow the teachings of any of these authors today and you will still find success.

As companies accelerate to embrace all these "New Marketing" ideas, the classics become more surprising, more novel and more effective.

At some point, everything old is new again. Simple beats complicated. Comfort beats confusion.

"Retro Marketing" is just around the corner.

UPS has over 94,000 delivery vehicles, 282 airplanes (the 8th largest fleet in the world) and over 425,000 employees across the globe. Over the years they have developed one of the most sophisticated hand held devices ever devised. There are well over 70,000 of them deployed worldwide. They call it the Delivery Information Acquisition Device, DIAD for short. The latest iteration has 3 different radio types and is the instant entry point for a tracking system that averages over 10 million tracking requests a day.

So how do you put a device that sophisticated in the hands of so many people without bringing the company to a crawl or opening a small university to train everyone? Make the interface dead simple.

Every time I see those DIAD devices in the hands of my UPS delivery person it reminds me of an experience I had with a UPS driver almost 8 years ago. As I watched him click clack away at the large array of buttons on this intimidating notebook sized device with such extraordinary speed and precision I had to ask him “How hard is that thing to use?” What he showed me has stuck with me ever since. On the small monochromatic screen, just above 2 sets of blue up/down arrows were the words “Hit the blue up.” — “It’s great” he said “totally dumbed down.”

Now, he did not say “dumbed down” in a negative way. He was clearly proud about his speed and proficiency on this complex piece of electronics that anyone would be overwhelmed by at first (or tenth) glance. The story has stuck in my mind because that phrase, “dumbed down,” continues to come up so often over the years.

When I tell this story to clients, audiences or prospects the response I often hear is:

“No, no… I don’t want to dumb it down. Our customers are smarter, more savvy, more…”

When we work on marketing, new products, business ideas, web sites, presentations,etc...  We spend a lot of time making sure that everything sounds as complicated as it can be. Complicated has come to equal uniqueness. Why? The more complex we can make our offerings (Or make them sound that way) the more differentiated we will be. I believe the opposite to be true. Now more than ever.

When we get worried about dumbing something down, whose intelligence are we worried about insulting? Do you think the UPS drivers think the IT group has dumbed things down for him or her? Or does the extreme simplification make the cumbersome manageable? When someone visits your web site and there is language that makes each move incredibly clear do you think the visitor feels insulted? When someone can understand what you are offering and why they should care without having to go through 68 slides, they will thank you.

The challenge we all face is to make something so incredibly powerful and complex, like the UPS DIAD, yet make it so extraordinarily accessible that it takes seconds for the user to put that power to use.

Whether it is a multi billion dollar global communication system or making it extraordinarily clear where someone can find something in your catalog, website or store you are not insulting their intelligence, you simply give them ones less thing they have to work through.

Not dumbing it down would have caused the tightest ship in the shipping business to sink just when they were trying to make a huge innovation leap. How many businesses do not embrace new technology because they fear that doing so would bring the company to a grinding halt? If the new way is more painful than the old way then the old way will always be too easy to fall back on.

How much did UPS save in training/support/complaint/re-training costs by dumbing it down? Hundreds of millions at least. How much did making the interface dead simple change the kind of real time information it wanted back from the devices? None.

Whatever it is you are offering, selling or trying to convey, no matter how complex it may be, how do you explain it as easily as Hit the blue up?

Your customers are busy. They no longer like to do a lot of reading (If they ever did) and they want to understand what is in it for them in as short a time as possible. Do yourself a favor and dumb it down for them.

The late, great Johnny Carson once said about comedy... "If you buy the premise..you buy the bit."

It seems to me that when you dig all the way down, so much of the discussion on sales, marketing, buzz, tipping points, etc.. come down to figuring out a highly efficient way for people "buy the premise." But we are spending most of are time trying to get people to simply "buy the bit."

The key is to hone that premise so that it allows people to buy into it as personally, quickly and easily as possible.

Imagine if a comedian opened his routine with the equivalent of...

• A 40 slide PowerPoint or
• The first 200 pages of a 300 page business book or
• 20 pages of proposal verbiage or
• 50 phone calls and a folder of brochures and clippings or
• A slew of PR firms, ad agencies and Marketing guru's...

... they would get booed off the stage every time. And quite rightly.

Think of how a truly great comedian can quickly connect to you, can set out the environment/situation/problem that you can totally relate to and then..BAM...that quickly...they deliver a punch line that generates a memorable response... The "bit" is sold.

What is the premise you are selling? How could you hone it to perfection so it takes the receiver only moments until they connect and buy it?

Focus on the premise and the bit takes care of itself.