Category: Sales

If your biased and you know it clap your hands

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Organizational alignment isn’t necessarily a positive. Huh? Having everyone on the same page, aligned, and headed in one direction can be a very good thing…unless of course the same page happens to be in the wrong book and/or the direction is the wrong direction.

There is something called ‘Choice-supportive bias‘.
In short, you ascribe much value to the known quantity that is your decisions.

When someone looks to take a company or a division a new direction or re-align sales territories they are bucking the system. Perhaps in a small way, perhaps in a big way, but either way, there is no longer alignment but rather diffusion is introduced.

If you are in sales or marketing you run up against this everyday. When I am selling something I am attempting to challenge another individual’s (or company’s) past decision/s. This is emotional. People, myself included, really like the decisions we have made and sometimes hate it when people try to ‘buck’ their system.  Continue reading “If your biased and you know it clap your hands” →

Ascribing Value: How your clients view your brand

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The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if there were candidates for a prize. -CS Lewis

Rarely do you hear a referral/non-referral of a product or service that is void of emotion. Rather, it’s based on emotion. We find ourselves using the features and aspects of a service to justify our emotion behind the praise/dis-praise always adding a personal bias to what it is we are describing. Lawn care, a bowling ball, outsourced technology, a CPA – none are exempt from this range of thinking.

Thus, as a marketing/sales person I must remember the ramifications of this as I engage in the market place.

  • Our clients, to no fault of their own, will only dig as deep as their recent emotion to validate or dismiss the product/service.
  • Managing expectations may be the most crucial aspect in protecting the future praise of your service
  • In a service model, strong client relationships protect against dis-praise and/or promote praise despite the actual evidence for such a testimony
  • Law of diminishing return will set it in with long standing clients, the pain, now gone due to your product/service, tends to lose meaning over time, thus emotions must be stoked through proving new value and/or services that further enable or prevent pain

Baumol’s Cost Disease and What it Means to You

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When I went college it cost roughly $5,000 a year for tuition and books (yes, it was a state school). The same school now costs about $8,000 a year. My guess is that the education hasn’t changed much materially but the cost has increased roughly 60%. Why is this the case?

Baumol’s Cost Disease  – in short – a rise of cost with little corresponding increase in productivity

Many people, wrongly in my assumption, have turned to education as a way to punt on these ‘hard economic times’. They have chosen to stay in school or go back to school in search for greener pastures that they assume will be there after graduation. This has led to a surge in demand causing a material increase in the cost of education while the quality in education has remained constant and/or declined due to the volume/quality argument. Continue reading “Baumol’s Cost Disease and What it Means to You” →