Author: remap_content_admin

Value selling is a Messaging approach in which features and benefits are mapped to distinct value propositions that help sell. These value propositions are in turn mapped to specific customer types and are essential to good Positioning.

In theory, value selling works better than simply “benefits selling”, let alone “features selling”.

For example, Box.com might say:

Box is a single, secure, easy-to-use platform built for the entire content lifecycle, from file creation and sharing, to co-editing, signature, classification, and retention. Transform your business with a new approach to content.

Where the value selling Messaging Map looks like this:

Features: “single, secure, easy-to-use, file creation and sharing, to co-editing, signature, classification, and retention” 
Benefits: “for the entire content lifecycle / a new approach to content”
Value: “transform your business”

Note that in a given piece of actual copy, these elements may be completely intermixed, hinted at, or omitted, depending on what’s most effective. Value selling is applied universally though, allowing for variations in how companies use it in their sales and marketing.

Setting a price for a thing based on the value it creates for the buyer. A value-priced fee is typically X percentage of the value to the buyer of whatever they buy, such as 1% or 50%.

Value pricing differs from

• commodity-pricing strategies
• hourly pricing (aka “hourly billing”)
• various fixed-fee pricing approaches

Value pricing is determined through conversation and negotiation but is completely different from Value Selling.

A few days ago, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti were the hosts of Rising, a political commentary show on YouTube and owned by The Hill (as in capitol hill), a billionaire-backed political newspaper that covers and holds its way over DC.

Today, they are the hosts of Breaking Points. Some say their logo looks like that of a dating app. But it’s their logo, their show.

On the Kyle Kulinski episode in which Krystal and Saagar declared independence, Krystal explains why they left The Hill:

We talk all the time about how much we believe in the new media ecosystem how much we believe in independent media free of any sort of corporate influence. And so even though I have to admit I’m really nervous, and it feels very uncomfortable but in a good way, – we wanted to step out, and go independent, and do a show of our own

What they modestly omitted is that they are really good at what they do, which is to offer unique, authentic, political/cultural takes on the news cycle. That’s part of why their new channel had such a successful launch.

But it’s also because they created so much go-to-market visibility and clarity about their product, ie, their ideas. 

By the way, if you choose to have a publishing practice, look to independent media leaders like Krystal Ball and ask yourself this question:

How valuable is a “content marketing plan”, really?

You don’t “plan” your point-of-view, you find it.

*     *     *

But how you style your publication is a different question.

Style is another element in Breaking Point’s success as compared to, say, Matt Taibbi’s and Katie Halper’s new YouTube show Useful Idiots, which has a similar (a) market (b) talent level/stature of hosts and (c) corporate-to-indy narrative – but with just 22k subscribers in 4 weeks, compared to Breaking Point’s 132k subscribers in 4 days.

Breaking Point’s non-mainstream points-of-view come with mainstream media traits: high production values, tightly-scripted monologing, desks, formal dress, make-up artists, etc. Is this theatre? No, it’s messaging. You can tell because it creates clarity, in this case by focusing attention.

And all on a low-capex, bootstrapper budget.

Not just them either – there are now kitchen-utensil unboxing videos (in Indonesian, no less) with the production values of a Hollywood TV studio.

But they aren’t Hollywood TV shows and Breaking Points isn’t MSNBC or Fox News, where Krystal and Saagar worked.

What’s going on here? Two days ago, Venkatesh Rao wrote on Breaking Smart that:

the new studio economy is built around not one, but two types of studios. One is a big-budget, quality-controlled studio environment descended from the old Hollywood variety. But the other is something closer to an artist’s studio — a single well-appointed room with good lighting and all the tools (easels, paints, canvases, brushes, cleaning equipment) required for a single person to make paintings, without relying on anyone else.

On that premise, he makes dozens of brilliants points. I’ll just single out this one:

“human working relationships are the bottleneck in [content] production
….
when the minimum viable team to do something goes from 2 to 1, activity levels explode.”.

In the future, marketing for some consultants and entrepreneurs will look like sitting in that solo studio. Rather than easels and paints, professional-quality mics, cameras, lighting, and UX design, with a MacBook as the hub and a cloud tech stack.

All of which you master.

For example, startup founder Dries Buytaert was “still at my desk learning CSS” just months before selling his 12-year-old venture for $1B. #nobottlenecks.

Simple? Easy? Hell no. Advisable? It depends. If you accept the challenge, here’s to a show of your own (:

Rowan

Helping people solve their problems by offering about three solutions with your favorite in the middle

“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
– Neil Gaiman

That’s good advice, but tough for a consultant. Aren’t we supposed to know how to fix it? Because we’re special exceptions to Gaiman’s observations?

Heh, yeah right.

Like Karl Marx and a thousand others, we’re better at diagnosing the problem than at prescribing a fix.

This is why you should offer, given the chance, a variety of options over a specific option.

Just as it is with tiered pricing((Tiered pricing strategy is covered in depth in Pricing Creativity)) or product ladders((Roundup of consulting product ladders)). Options.

And how else is the “choicing” of price points, product suites, and consultative options related?

By limited choice. As in 3 or 4.

You may have heard the story about the jam seller with 26 varietals of jam at the Saturday market. He sold almost nothing compared to the jam seller with 3 choices.

Three choices lead to another significant pattern: the allure of middle choice. One product will perform better just as one price point will. It’s almost always the one in the middle. 

That’s because we talking-apes survived by avoiding the extremes; not the lush mountains, not the treeless plans, but the wooded savannah.

This preference is automatic, like a dog rotating around in circles to make an invisible bed on an empty wooden floor. We’re a bit smarter than dogs so such behavior amuses us. Yet we’re like them in this respect, as cataloged in Baldacci’s Influence.

Also consider Seth’s post on “reorganizing the time stack”:

If you spend about the same amount of time as everyone else, you’re likely to get about the same amount of benefit.

There are two other choices, worth considering:

Spend significantly more time than anyone else thinks is reasonable. Charge appropriately. Perhaps this will lead to an extraordinary outcome.

Spend far less time than you’re supposed to, and invest that time into processes and alternatives and benefits that everyone else is overlooking.

In this case, two of the three choices are recommendable but the middle choice (“extraordinary outcome”) is the clear winner. Did he put this choice in the middle on purpose? I don’t know but there it is, where it belongs, attracting us.

The upshot:

• Can you train your mind to develop, on the fly, three recommended courses of action to problems that come up? Instead of spitting out the first that comes to mind? 
• When you are dead certain you know the right fix, can you still sandwich it between two alternatives? 
• Can you do the above without sounding like a choice-making robot or otherwise disrupting the flow of conversation? That’s true choicecraft: conversational flow trumps all else.

Consulting is about helping people think like an expert in your areas of expertise, not about thinking for them, let alone making their decisions. 

Bests
Rowan

You don’t realize how boring your life is until someone asks you what your hobbies are, right?

On that note, I read the dictionary for “fun” (like some of you!?)

More fun to read is the new book, The Positioning Manual for Indie Consultants. For me at least.

And I made a mini-dictionary out of it (below).

I think the book will fascinate the following types:

• solo indie consultants, which is the intended primary audience
• not-indie consultants or subject matter experts (working for a company)
• owners of small consulting firms
• creative or technical agency owners
• independent freelancers of many kinds

Beyond that list, any student of business who enjoys business strategy and business ideas will enjoy this book. Say, for example, you’re interested in the concept of leadership and you tend to be on the lookout for new and interesting takes on the subject.

Listen to these observations from the book (obviously, this isn’t everything the book has to say on leadership but it’s interesting):

Leaders use the tools of story, narrative, maps, frameworks, ubiquity, status, speaking, and manifestos. They may operate using expensive data, gut feel, or anything in between.

Even though the context for these observations is solo indie consulting, you can definitely apply it elsewhere.

Next, consider this interesting digression:

in the most open of open systems, things are so chaotic and fast-moving that the social relationships underpinning the social styles of tryst earning simply don’t have time to form. In a fast-moving open system, everybody is a newcomer and everybody is, in a relative sense, a stranger to each other.

Exactly right! If you have any experience with the enormous and fairly lawless open-source micro-economy, WordPress, this will resonate. Or with blockchain and secure tokens.

I will let those two excerpts, though, make my case that the book is worthy – and not divulge the rest of it.

The Inner Dictionary of TPM

Instead, I have culled the book for its “inner dictionary”.

Which is basically a de facto glossary of terms. Except rather than consisting of obscure jargon, this glossary mostly consists of redefinitions of common business terms, like marketing or audience. Actually – most good business books do. And so do most good businesses, but I’ll save that for another time.

For now, let’s dive right into the definitions, or “redefinitions”, of TPM. These are the author’s verbatim words.

Marketing is earning visibility and trust for your service offerings, business, or thinking

An Audience is a group of people or businesses that share something important in common

A Beachhead [is a specialization decision that] provides an indie consultant with access and momentum to achieve a larger strategic goal

An Innovation is an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new and provides perceived relative advantage

A Market Position is when enough of the market thinks of you as focused on a certain market vertical, a certain horizontal (problem or platform), or a certain kind of service 

A Platform specialization is when an indie consultant provides services mostly or exclusively specialized in a certain platform

A Pure Horizontal Specialization is when you specialize in solving a specific problem or applying a specific form of expertise and you do not care much which business vertical or audience your clients come from

Service Specialization is where you specialize your service delivery. This is often synonymous with productization (where you standardize the scope and pricing of your services) or, more specifically, innovative service productization, where you standardize your scope in a unique way that is attractive to a narrow spectrum of clients

A Multidimensional Specialization is when you combine both vertical horizontal specializations

Leadership is helping a group of people respond to exogenous change or generate endogenous change

Management is helping a group optimize the status quo

What do think about these definitions? I think they are (a) very interesting and (b) give you a pretty good idea of what the book is about.

To see these redefinitions in use – to see how they support the book’s ideas, grab a copy of it. And let me know if the “inner dictionary” is missing anything.

Bests
Rowan

Have you ever heard the one about the streaker?

It goes like this. On a hot summer day, The Truth and the Lie are walking together on a road. They come across a deep, cool well and the Lie tells the Truth, “this water is perfect, let’s take a swim”. The Truth is skeptical but verifies himself that the water is indeed perfect. So they take off their clothes and jump in. But then, the Lie silently climbs out of the well, steals the Truth’s clothes, and darts off. The Truth chases him but in vain – he looks everywhere – villages, towns, cities, World Cup stadiums. But all the world sees is a streaker. In fact, the naked Truth disgusts the world. Overcome with shame, the Truth retreats to the deep well and hides forever. And ever since, the Lie walks through the world dressed in the clothes of the Truth. 

Who’s the villain in this Kahlil Gibran classic? (Which was not called “the streaker”, hehe) The Lie, definitely. But maybe also the world, us? We’re judgemental and not very perceptive. I’m not that impressed with the Truth, either – he gives up way too easily. But at least he appears to have stayed true to himself.

*    *    *

Publishing as a business practice is revising the role of the Truth in this story.

So instead of hiding in the well, you’re finding a new way to keep telling your story about what you do, what you make, and why certain kinds of people like it. In other words, you have to keep telling it, until you are believed by strangers. On the way there, you might end up cringing at some of what you come up with. Even embarrassed, if you’re like me.

Can you do this while remaining “the Truth”? And not taking on another role.

The most compelling entrepreneurs we meet are the ones who cling to being the Truth and hate the Lie.

For a craft brewing impresario I know, participating in a circular economy is a truthful way of creating a conscientious business. So he only sells his beer in bottles that are re-used dozens of times and then recycled. And he can license the complex tracking systems that support that business model to other beverage businesses.

As is the case with 99% of entrepreneurs, his publishing practice consists of:

1. Having conversations, sometimes with strangers, sometimes with others in his industry or related ones. In this way, he practices articulating the vision over and over through ad-libbed, natural exchanges. 
2. Delegating the publication of a lightweight social media newsfeed to hired hands

Nothing at all wrong with that publication model. It may not work for, say, an indie consulting practice. It may not scale, like Gary V in Purple Cow. But he’s sticking to what he thinks is true without hiding in a deep dark well.

Here’s to your business also starring as the Truth (without an obnoxious messiah-complex, of course!) no matter how much it disgusts the world.

Have a great weekend
Rowan

 

 

I met a guy named Edon, a 43-year old Albanian with great English whose grandmother was shot in the leg at the age of 13. The shooting took place in a village on the other side of the mountain from Albania’s capital city of Tirana.

This was an accident, though, as the shooter was aiming for her older brother. 

The most surprising detail of this story was that the attempted killing was legal – he was the target of a blood feud.

Edon’s story got me interested in the history of blood feuds in Albania. I learned more in Ismail Kadare’s Broken April:

• Albanian blood feuds were codified under laws called “the Kanun”, and common in remote, mountainous areas (which comprise most of the country)
• These laws were overseen by a highland prince in the mountain city of Orkosh
• His chief consultant, the “Steward Of The Blood“, collected a tax each time there was a blood feud killing – and kept detailed records
• Thousands of blood feuds were recorded every year. And almost every calendar day of the year, over centuries, multiple killers came to Orkosh to pay the blood feud tax

As you might imagine, this system became a gruesome business model. Not unlike the private prison system currently in place in the US.

The more blood feuds, the fatter the bank accounts of this mountain prince. He was anxious when killings were down. Thus, he took measures:

• laws were laden with technicalities to make reconciliation difficult
• and dishonorable
• old feuds were resurrected at the behest of eager, record-keeping clerks

Pattern Matching

In Broken April, an early 20th-Century Steward Of The Blood frets over a particularly bad year in blood-killing revenue. First, he pores over centuries of data in the record books. At a loss, he then saddles a horse and wanders through the land for answers.

Having traveled some, the steward reflects on the parallels between agriculture and blood feuds, along with tax revenue implications:

• Old blood feuds were like old, long-cultivated fields, less productive but more consistent decade-over-decade. Fewer killings per year (as fewer bushels of wheat per year) but more reliable.
• Conversely, a new blood feud was like a newly-cultivated field. If a farmer got lucky and hit a deposit of rich, volcanic topsoil, he might come away with a tremendous yield for a few years. Likewise, new feuds exploded with passion; dozens of lives might be taken with a few years.
• On the other hand, the farmer’s luck might not last once a thin layer of nutrient-rich soil was depleted or washed away. Just as newly-begun blood feuds might be quashed quickly by wise elders seeking reconciliation.
• A valley with a high ratio of tilled to untilled fields meant too few blood feuds  (farmers could hide at home safely and let their fields lie untilled). Thus, whenever the steward rode his horse to a high vantage point overlooking a valley, he could at a glance predict future blood feud revenue
• Wars and natural disasters displaced villages or entire valleys, causing blood feuds to fade from importance and memory – war and invasion was bad for business
• A valley with too high a ratio of untilled to tilled fields, on the other hand, meant too little food and agricultural tax income. Balance was needed.

Happy sidenote – blood feuds have been largely eliminated from Albanian and greater Balkan society (though not completely; there’s still work to be done). 

But what can we learn from this sad history? Firstly, take every opportunity to rewrite, revise, or reject rules, traditions, and best practices. 

But there’s also an insight-development lesson: the steward of the blood didn’t rely on data alone for understanding. He only formed valuable insights once he got on the horse and got the bigger picture firsthand.

If you aggregate enough data, sure, then it alone can be mined for patterns. In theory, that works for a huge business, such as industrial manufacturer Honeywell, energy conglomerate ExxonMobil, or the Big Tech monopolies.

But for the rest of us, maybe insight often comes from doing things.

How about you, where do get insights from? Can you get your hands on enough data relevant to your business to find insights from the data alone? 

Bests
Rowan

• Should you productize your services?
• If so, just one product or many – a “product ladder”?

I really don’t know. People I respect have wildly different approaches to this.

• Pia Silva: “Focus all your energy on making one great productized service (and one “intro product”); don’t publish your services on your site“
• Jonathan Stark: “Offer a product ladder offering multiple services; publish them on your site“

Which is the “right” approach? For you, for your clients? Both options above seem good and I think it depends which is best. Pia’s model is probably better if you’re:

• newer to consulting or content-creation
• risk-tolerant
• relish brand-building
• have a smaller audience or network
• less meticulous
• less given to a publishing practice

Whereas Jonathan’s logic’n’discipline approach might work better if you have been consulting for 10 years or more, are super-organized, and have a big mailing list.

*    *    * 

But forget about how. or whether, to package your services into products for a minute; that’s not the larger point I want to make.

The point is related to this rule from Venkatesh Rao: “Offer choices, not recommendations“.

A specific recommendation can be an illusory comfort. Thus, a consultant offers wisdom, instead of certainty, in the form of two or more great choices.

Part of this approach’s value proposition is that the client gets to contrast smart choices offered, like those of Pia and Jonathan.

This compare and contrast process may lead your clients to make valuable self-recommendations. More importantly, it may lead them to think more effectively about the right areas of their business.

You don’t always get to do this, though. Some of your work might still look like providing specific recommendations (ie deliverables). So look for your opportunities.

When’s the next time you will have the chance to offer wise choices instead of a certain recommendation? How will you frame your choices as strategies to consider, not deliverables to revise? And will you resist the urge to push your pet favorite?

Enjoy that challenge (:
Rowan

 

According to Deborah Levy, unwillingness to copy is a form of selfcentred-ness. This prevents you from, say, learning foreign languages and customs when you’re abroad. The Duolingo app, on the other hand, teaches you a new language by practically forcing you to mimic, like a parrot.

*    *    *

Gary Halbert was a master of direct marketing, which it’s useful to think of as an obsolescent form of marketing belonging to the industrial era. But he was also a thoughtful person, a good writer, and a father who wrote an advice book for his son called, The Boron Letters. (Sounds like a Jack Vance novel).

I didn’t read the whole thing but used my Kindle app’s search function to go straight to the part about copying, to research a longer article on the subject.

Anyway, in The Boron Letters, Gary advises his son to learn business (not just advertising but business) by copying famous advertisements like this one by hand. Like 1000s of others have done over the eons, hand-copying the works of writers who came before them – “copywork”.

Well, it’s the same with digital products.

For example, say you are selling a book in 2021. (If so, you’re selling an ebook. The only difference is length and how you attempt to position it). The book’s front cover is a web page, not a piece of paper or cardboard or whatever. It’s something on a screen. Or many screens ideally.

Screen-as-book-cover has its advantages. For example, see how James Clear lets you download the first chapter of Atomic Habits before buying it – and gain him an email subscriber? It’s like Amazon but without the seizure-inducing UI. The point is – cardboard covers can’t do that.

If you’re making books or other digital content such as newsletter articles, ebooks, or whitepapers, consider copying James Clear approach. Merlin Sheldrake does this perhaps more artfully. But the “cover” of James Clear’s book works better. 

*    *    *

Gary Halbert also said that you will start to sound like whoever you are copying by hand. Of course. That’s not the punchline. If you blatantly copy Clear’s homepage, you will sound and feel like him, as though you were wearing a James Clear bodysuit and voice modulator. 

But as Gary Halbert points out, your peculiarities will eventually emerge and set you apart from whoever your copying. Because it’s creepy to fake being someone else for long. And you just have an urge to erase what doesn’t feel right.

If you don’t copy James Clear (or anyone else) as you make things, you will continue to sound like some undifferentiated mix of all of the other infinite content shoved down your brain every day. Your voice can emerge from that swamp, but more slowly, without the accelerant that the art of copying gives you.

Publishing is one of the pillars of independent consulting and entrepreneurship. Maybe not high-frequency publishing, maybe not even writing – but some kind of publishing. So the next question is who do you want to copy and why?

Bests
Rowan