Demanding Our Humanity from Companies

“Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.” Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

I've been on the front lines of the consumption of personal computing and enterprise software for 30 years now. Has life improved with the ubiquity of the digital lifestyle?  In many ways - yes.  We are often more effective, efficient and sophisticated.  We are more informed about the world we live in.  What was the cost?Perhaps forgetting the unique value of being a human being.  A history lesson that often repeats itself: When a pendulum swings fast, it often slides right by the point of a healthy balance.  

We need to fight hard everyday for the human difference.  There are lots of people in the world, but so few human beings. Let's take that a step further and say that there are so many companies in the world, but so few that treat us like human beings.  If I call your company and I go into voice options, my head and heart hurts.  As an example, I use Squarespace for my web site since their friendly support gets back to me in often less than an hour.  Although they use technology as a tool, they emphasize being human when helping me.

Could it be this simple?  Is it possible to choose companies based on how human they are?  I understand the value of digital, I've contributed to it at every stage, but I want to walk on the cool grass and be human. Let the machines be the machines, human beings have so much more to offer than machines.  If you don't believe me, remember who invented (and keeps improving) the machines.

Your company can make my life better.  It can help me feel more human and motivate me to talk about your company in a way that distinguishes you.  Can you sign up for that expectation or does that get in the way of your worshipped efficiency?    Because once you choose to worship efficiency over being human - as a customer, that's my signal to choose someone else.  

The Dangers of Not Having a Clear Company Purpose

The average life expectancy of a company in the S&P 500 has dropped from 75 years in 1937 to 15 years. Do executives really think their best employees haven't figured out that they should want to be where they are?  Only mediocre employees will stay where they are not motivated by a driving purpose.  These self-limiting employees believe they have few choices.  How wonderful that a company gets left with the least valuable and most desperate.  If we knew where that tipping point was, it would be a good time to dump the stock.

Another study showed that 71% of employees are not engaged in their place of work – and the least engaged are the most highly educated.  This is absurd.  Either we're doing a terrible job of hiring, work is awful or we have no idea on how to motivate people with our purpose.  I believe it's the latter since mission and vision have been hammered to a pulp and confused with purpose.  Executives need to amplify a simple and valuable unifying purpose. They shouldn't provide a reasons for their best people to leave in an improving economy that offers better choices for a more fulfilling life.

Read about Purposefire or watch the video.

Bizarro World Marketing and the B2B Journey

In popular culture, largely influenced by the Seinfeld television program, "Bizarro World" has come to mean a situation or setting which is weirdly inverted or opposite of expectations. There has been a great deal of talk about the customer journey.   Just for fun, let’s visit Bizarro World and a common view of the B2B Customer Journey.

Awareness 

You should be able to find our amazing company.  We have a website built by a friend of ours that empowers our 30 visitors to engage with an average of 1.2 pages every day.  Aren’t the search engines and social media fantastic when it comes to helping prospects become aware of companies like ours? Our employees find so many terrific things on the Internet all day since we’re not bothered by a lot of existing customers.  We love this new way of marketing, just sit and wait for leads. It’s going to happen, we can feel it.  What’s for lunch?  One more question, what the heck is blogging?

Evaluation

What’s all this talk about content and how it helps at every stage of the journey?  Look, we’re not the New York Times or a university.  Just come talk to us. Once people know how great our products are, the news will spread like wildfire anyway. The most amazing thing about us is that we do this without expressing any knowledge about your industry.  It’s an interesting game you get to play called, “find the value”.

Purchase

Again, why do you keep asking for content?  We have a sales team that will talk your ear off!  They make up their own presentations and they keep changing them based on the hot terms of the day.  We like to throw more salespeople at our marketing problems.  This way we get rid of our most expensive and capable sales people since their job is next to impossible to perform due to our marketing approach.  We call this close-looped failure.

Discovery about your situation is for wimps.  We know our products are the best and soon you will too. The key here is to just keep putting our competition down.  To beat you over the head with constant messaging on why we’re better than anyone with no 3rd party validation. But here's the best part for our customers. We believe drop our pants pricing is easier than carrying the burden as an educator or high-level advisor. Now that's a win-win.

Loyalty

Once you're a customer, we don’t talk to you except when there’s a problem.  We only get excited about new prospects, not companies we have already sold.  Give you a heads up on what’s happening in your industry or how our other solutions could help you?  Our sales folks are busy creating dynamic presentations for prospects.  Just sign up for our email blast and watch our annual press release.  That should do it.  Call us!

Turning Your Loss into the World's Gain

Sometimes plans go so badly you wonder what the world has against you.  You work hard, are a good person by anyone's standards and you're smart.  But life throws curve after curve and you'd just like to see one good pitch thrown down the middle.

Have you stopped to consider that a disappointment is part of your long-term journey as a human being? How about the viewpoint that your "loss" was necessary to have the right empathy for someone who was hanging by a thread?  

I have noticed that financial success for a person with a weak foundation only fuels their areas of weakness as a human being.  Embrace your failures as part of your journey or you may miss the lesson and the real difference you are destined to make in the world.

Creating Separation Through Trust

It's 2013, can we stop talking about what we do and focus on why we do it?  We probably should have never separated marketing and sales.   Marketing is what we do to establish a modicum of trust before we really know the customer.  Selling is what we do to deepen the trust that we will actually help the customer. Trust is why you will become our customer.  You could say that marketing and sales are simply strategies to accomplish trust.

In the 20th century, we separated marketing and sales because it was the time of industrialization and the military.  We were obsessed with the measurable results of both so we focused on specialization.  We also centralized all of our communication efforts and even established war rooms at our companies.  Companies acted like we were in a war when most of us didn’t have a clue about war. 

The world is moving away from what we do and more interested in why we do it. The separation of marketing and sales in your organization is the wrong separation to be discussing.  When so many people don’t trust organizations or leaders, the right separation to be discussing is how trust will distinguish your collective value.

A Crisis of Trust is a Crisis of Growth

According to a recent study by Edelman, just 18 percent of the public thinks leaders will tell them the truth.  In case you don’t want to do the math; 82% of the public do not think leaders tell the truth. 

I believe this lack of trust is a result of the example bias.  We have extraordinary examples of companies, governments, institutions, and leaders that stick in our minds.  I don’t believe it is accurate or healthy to distrust the majority, but it’s hard to figure out just who to trust.

Great enemies of trust are fear and comfort.  When leaders are afraid of their own organizations, they push their fear down into the company.  If leadership sees comfort as their priority, they will attain mediocrity, share less and lead from the rear.  The saddest part of this is that we teaching a generation of workers to aim for mediocrity while their generation wrestles with underemployment.  Do you see the problem here?  We are teaching them to be happy to just have a job.  To not have the courage to do big things.  Can we at least start by trusting our own organizations and the people in them?  The alternative is a life less lived.