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Most of us should work on two businesses at minimum – the current business and the future business. And you can roughly divide your time fifty-fifty to address the needs of each.

Current business activities look like:

• Getting new clients for the kind of work you do now 
• Doing client work
• Delivering client work
• Proposals and contracting
• Bookkeeping and other operations processes
• Refining current products and services

Future business activities look a little different:

• Talking to new clients about the kind of work your future business does
• Designing future products and services
• Doing research on your market
• Designing and implementing growth strategies for the future
• Publishing/recording your thinking and insights 

Caution: if you’re spending 95% of your time on the current business, the future business will suffer.

You’ll notice that the two businesses have something in common: clients.

BTW, here’s the difference between the two – getting clients for the kind of work you do now looks more like sales or outreach marketing.

Whereas getting clients for the work you do tomorrow looks more like marketing, especially content marketing or inbound marketing.

But something else happens when you work on your future business – you create content about the work problems you used to have but have now mastered. You can even ask yourself, where are you helping a prior version of yourself solve a problem you used to have?

You know more about this than almost anyone. Among other things, this’ll make you a great team leader and a pretty good hiring manager too. 

Our right-now business pays the bills, but we need to find out if we do helpful work for three versions of ourselves: past, present, and future.

My best
Rowan

My conversation with subscriber Oliver become a very nice article.

Imagine this:

• You answer the question, “who was the best client you ever worked with?” 
• Based on your answer, you get a list of 1400 similar clients
• You spent 40 years studying those 1400 clients
• You identified 11 out of 1400 which were superb businesses in every sense
• You figured out exactly what those 11 companies had in common

Apart from the first bullet, this is the creation story of Jim Collins’ Good to Great. It’s not surprising that it’s packed full of wisdom: 

• Create a “Stop Doing This” list 
• People matter more than vision, strategy, or processes. Doggedly pursue good people.
• Be a hedgehog (does one thing perfectly) not a fox (does many things)
• Great leaders don’t have great big personalities; they’re “normal people”

That’s a random selection of interesting observations but if you were to sum up the book in one sentence:

be fanatically picky about who you hire and disciplined about what you focus on, how you act, and how you think.

In fact, discipline is the book’s keyword. 

The challenge you and I have with the great business strategy books (this one is probably top 10 all-time)  is that they’re not really written for us. They’re mostly written for the Fortune 500, rather than independent businesses.

There are exceptions to this rule. Pricing Creativity, The Positioning Manual for Technical Firms, The Business of Expertise, Win Without Pitching, Getting Real and Company of One were expressly written for niche, independent, expertise-driven businesses. 

Meanwhile, the average headcount of the Good to Great “Top 11” was 2,300. You’d think you’d have to do a lot of translating to apply this corporate wisdom to indie firms.

But not so much. Take the flywheel.

The 7th and final feature of great companies identified in Good to Great is the presence of the “Flywheel” effect. People apply it to sales and marketing – a steady flow of leads from marketing efforts lets you both hone your sales process and focus on doing great work and publishing high-value content marketing. Which in turn generates more leads. Without having to start the flywheel.

Jim Collins uses it in a larger sense – for him, it’s a flywheel of discipline.  Disciplined thinking leads to disciplined focus leads to disciplined action – and back to thinking – in all areas of a business.

This sounds a lot like the virtuous cycle of cognitive-behavioral therapy – actions influence thoughts, thoughts influence feelings, feelings influence actions. This might be the most important cycle of all to pay attention to for the independent entrepreneur. 

All of these flywheels of virtue begin with a little bit of discipline..  back to the “Stop Doing This” list we go.

My best
Rowan

Not all certainties are alike.

In his This is Water commencement speech at Kenyon College, long-haired, Gen-X author David Foster Wallace talks about two young fish swimming in a tank. They meet an older fish who greets them.

“How’s the water?”, asks the older fish. 

Confused by the question, the young fish continue swimming with nonplussed, fishlike expressions. Then one asks the other, “What the hell is water?”.

The point of Wallace’s little parable is that we don’t really see or think about what’s all around us all the time, even if it’s important. Especially when life gets tedious, stressful, and dull. University educations don’t teach us “how to think” when we’re stuck in rush hour traffic for the 4th time this week.

He later unfolds that point into a larger takeaway, which he tacks on to a short story featuring an atheist vs a religionist. The villain of that story is a trait they share: blind certainty, which Doer describes as a mental prison.

But Wallace offers an alternative:

To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

There’s a transition here from holding blind certainties to questioning one’s own certainties as a default mode of thinking. You might call the latter, “cultivating informed certainties”.

My attempt at an informed certainty

Not long ago, I was certain that the homepage of your B2B expertise business should have one, single call-to-action (CTA) oriented toward lead generation. I could cite several well-known books that back up that theory. A year ago, in fact, I offered 18 pieces of marketing advice for the “above-the-fold” area of your homepage on an email to this list.

Three pieces of advice had to do with CTAs:

• • The most prominent thing to click on by far should be the lead capture call-to-action (CTA)
  • Always include this CTA twice – in the (sitewide) header on the far right and in the main above-the-fold area 
  • Do not ever have more than one CTA above-the-fold; the header’s CTA and the main CTA should be identical – use the exact same words for both

Now in my defense, there’s some good advice in that article, in case you’re looking for ideas on how to put together your business’s homepage. And in some cases, what I say about CTAs is an excellent, replicable formula.

But now I disagree with my former self. I generally think there should be one “direct marketing” style CTA and one “trust-based marketing”-style CTA. I think that’s even more true for product or service pages than for the home page.

In other words, always offer a CTA choice:

1. transact right now
2. learn more by reading, listening, or watching

I discussed this recently in contrasting Direct Marketing with Non-Direct Marketing.

E voilà – certainty disavowed. 

Generating informed certainty

The larger takeaway is that your job as a transformation-oriented consultant isn’t to provide certainty, ultimately. It’s to provide your clients with the ability to make less risky, more profitable decisions. You teach them how to think about a certain, limited set of business problems about which you have expertise.

Ahh, but there’s a catch: we have to start somewhere. So you have to bring your own wheels to the conversation so they don’t have to be reinvented. So you don’t have to A/B test Nonsense vs Nonsense. You have to bring informed certainties – and let them be challenged.

These could be enclosed in templates, questionnaires, briefs, or best practices.

But the best-informed certainties are what you instinctively repeat on almost every client call especially when you publish your thoughts on them – publicly.

You can think of these informed certainties as “strategy prompts”. I have a point-of-view on this subject. Here’s how it might help your business.

That’s a much better starting place than going in blind – or blindly certain.

Warm regards,
Rowan

PS This Storygrid podcast will take you deeper into the subject of Certainty vs Wisdom through publishing

When a fashion designer or a tailor works on an item of clothing, they use a mannequin. Because creating something complex, like a coat, would be hard to do while it lies on the floor.

It’s the same principle with creating messaging – you need a mannequin to hang the messaging work on. Only then will you understand whether it’s working: Whether it describes whom the business is for, what it’s for, and how it works. (David C Baker talks about the 8 feet test – put your laptop on a table, open it to the homepage of a business website, and see if you can tell what the company is about.)

For a small, expertise-based B2B venture there exist specialized “messaging mannequins” on which to do your work.

And they’re neither Word nor Google Docs. Nor Ulysses or Scrivener. Etcetera. 

Because messaging isn’t just writing; it’s also UX design.

Inside a word processing document, your messaging does about as much good as a coat lying on the floor on a chilly fall evening.

So where do you create messaging? The first and best place is a website or app wireframe editor, like Balsamiq.cloud. Or a pen and piece of paper. Second-best is a presentation deck editor, such as Powerpoint or Google Slides. Canva works too but beware of settling on messaging for a snippet of content that will only make up part of the whole. Each word on the page affects every other.

When you create your messaging on one of these mannequins you preserve mental energy wasted on imagining what it will look like where it counts most – the homepage of your website.

Nor do you suffer the inaccuracy that comes from forcing your mind to do something it’s not specialized at. 

What you are specialized at is solving problems for a specific type of business. You do your job, let the mannequin do its job. 

Because you hand a web designer or a deck designer a Word doc with words scribbled everywhere, you are basically saying: I’m not a thinker, I’m just supplying content. Here’s some fabric, you do the hard work of figuring out what this coat should look like.

Warm regards,
Rowan

One more thing from Rand Fishkin’s Lost and Founder – he calls out two types of calls-to-action (CTAs):  the”Direct CTA” and the “Transitional CTA”.

They correlate to the two types of marketing that you have to master in your own business;  you might call them the Yin and Yang of marketing.

Some of the other ways people have described this dichotomy:

• Direct Marketing vs Brand Marketing
• Direct Marketing vs Trust-based Marketing
• Direct Advertising vs Image-based Advertising

Or you can just call it, “Non-Direct Marketing”, since we probably won’t ever coalesce around one term the way we have with, “Direct Marketing”.

Whatever you call them, these are very similar frameworks. But there are nuanced differences in the business-to-business world. 

As you can see, all agree on what Direct means – something leading to a specific transaction. This is usually buying, donating, trialing/demo’ing, or talking about doing so. This is the Yang of marketing – it’s active and has heat.

To continue an imperfect and blasphemous metaphor, if direct CTAs are Yang, transitional CTAs are Yin.

They don’t ask you to transact; they ask you to transition your thinking through reading, listening, or watching.

Non-direct marketing materials often have no CTA. Case in point: Deloitte’s airport advertisements consisting of dramatically empty space and fairly banal concepts, such as, “luck has nothing to do with success”.

There’s no direct call-to-action in this extremely expensive global ad campaign. 

There’s an implied transitional call-to-action, though.

Of what does the transition consist?

Shifting the perception of Deloitte from a staid consulting behemoth to a shrewd tech firm. The audience for these ads is at the intersection of corporate-minded and engineering-minded. The ads evoke a command line and build on a smart name change – the brand’s name swapped the highly problematic “& Touche” for a very edgy dot:

Deloitte.

There’s also a nerdy number sequence puzzle built into this particular ad: 11,8,24,18,21,? (If anyone knows what this is, please let me know – curious!).

The desired shift in thinking that Deloitte’s de facto “transitional CTA” calls for might not happen right away though. And it doesn’t happen because of the ad – it happens because of the reading, watching, and listening that happens after the ad’s audience engages with Deloitte’s digital presence.

So the transitional CTA is implied and happens over a long period of time and involves a change in perception.

We independent expertise firms can also ask our audience to read, watch, and listen – the important part.

However, can’t mount global non-direct marketing campaigns through paid advertising.  We have to find a different “top of funnel”.

My best,
Rowan

Consulting Products & Customer Success Management 

You’re not neutral; your tone creeps in.

Compare these options in your email reply-to handle:

• “Rowan the Big Kahuna <bigkahuna@acme.com>”
• “Rowan <rowan@acme.com>”
• “Rowan Hardin Price <rowan.price@acme.com”

If reply-to handles have lots of your personality, so do email greetings:

• Kate
• Kate,
• Hey Kate
• Hi Kate!

One school of thought: “be yourself”. Communicate how you always do.

But some of us just aren’t wired that way. And we can all over-ride our wiring in small ways.

Consider the “Big Five Personality Traits”:

1. Neuroticism or Emotional Stability (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)
2. Extraversion  (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
3. Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
4. Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)
5. Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/callous)

If you are sensitive, inventive, and compassionate, you’ll probably speak in the tone your audience expects to hear, whatever that may be. Mirroring, as psychologists call it.

If you are cautious, efficient, and callous, you probably drill-sargent your way through emails:

“Kate
Did you do the thing?
– Karen”

That’s OK at boot camp. And at an office in Philadelphia in 1985 or even 1885.  

In the office world of the 1880s, there were desks, writing machines, filing systems, electricity, telecom networks, daily commutes, elevators, staplers, water coolers, and IBM.

That world persists but it’s fragmenting under the mobile Internet and now the pandemic economy.

Add to the desk: car, bed, car seat on drive to store, kitchen, couch, and a jog. If this is where your message is soaked in, maybe its tone should be a little more you?

(Whatever “you” is – that’s another subject.)

Horton and Wohl studied and documented “para-social relationships” 64 years ago  – they said listeners and viewers experienced a feeling of intimacy and friendship with TV and radio personalities. If you were a broadcaster then, the audience knew you better than you knew their friends. Or at least it seemed like it.

One of the striking characteristics of the new mass media–radio, television, and the movies–is that they give the illusion of face-to-face relationships with the performer

A newer attachment theory: you have a business opportunity to foster micro-parasocial relationships through your content marketing. And those can turn into two-way relationships at the click of a button – like if you click ‘reply’ and weigh in here. 

Take care,
Rowan

In Rand Fishkin’s brilliant book, Lost and Founder, he tells the story of accelerating Moz‘s growth through conversion rate optimization. He did so by hiring the CRO consultants who would go on to found Conversion.com. It’s kind of a story about playing with fire.

On the one hand, these CRO consultants helped this B2B software company leverage the instant BizDev gratification of email marketing. If cold email marketing addresses people who’ve never heard of you, and warm email marketing current customers, this would be lukewarm email marketing – appealing to users who know you but perhaps never considered doing business with you.

Their pre-campaign research process categorized various types of leads into personas or whatever you want to call them. Then there were extensive and systematic interviews, like the process David Ogilvy makes the case for so well in Ogilvy on Advertising((From Ogilvy on Advertising, page 164: “Respondents do not always tell the truth to interviewers. I used to start my questionnaires by asking, “What would you rather hear on the radio tonight, Jack Benny or a Shakespeare play?”. If the respondent said Shakespeare, I knew he was a liar and broke off the interview”)). This exercise was in itself a valuable form of gathering audience intelligence and improving understanding.

But the immediate purpose was to convert site visitors to customers. As Rand describes it, Moz offered its monthly product for just $1, no strings attached, to the thousands of people who used the Moz.com forums and free tools.

And like Derek Sivers’ epic one-to-one email marathons, Rand and company personally responded to each email reply resulting from this campaign.

What did people want to know in their email replies? Whether the offer was no-strings-attached – whether they’d have to buy the additional month.

Were these people asking bargain-hunters, cheap, or too broke to afford a $40/month software subscription? No, not necessarily.

They just weren’t ready. They didn’t understand or were not ready yet to turn the $480/yr in subscription fees into $4,800 a year in *additional* profits. There is an art to leveraging subscription B2B software into a consulting practice; like most arts, it takes practice.

Churn

That’s the cautionary part of the tale. The emphasis on conversion optimization was profitable short-term but problematic to long-term growth because it created ongoing, messy churn.

I see this in many clients I talk to: an over-eagerness to optimize for conversion.  For larger-ticket products and services, the upshot of CRO isn’t so much churn as it is prospects never becoming a client in the first place.

Your prospective customers need a way to learn about you and your solutions without being sold to – and your web copy probably isn’t enough.

On the other hand, you also need a low-friction path to signing on the dotted line. It’s the pandemic economy – the time to leverage self-service ecommerce was yesterday, no matter how consultative and sales-driven your customer acquisition is.

Just don’t push people in that direction before they’re ready.

My best,
Rowan

“What’s the best CRM for B2B SaaS?”, someone asked me recently.

I get a question like this once or twice a week – what CRM should my business choose? 

When my job-job was to create marketing solutions using enterprise CRM, I took the product evangelist’s perspective – CRM is the technology heart of any business. I had seen organizations process tens of millions of dollars by leveraging CRM software. I’d seen it connect large teams of marketing, sales, and support. I was certain that every organization, even tiny consultancies, could use it.

The new class of templates-led organizational software that I wrote about last week is a sign of how much has changed. 

CRM is still important but it’s less than one-size-fits-all than ever before.

A few questions to consider for your B2B, expertise-based business when thinking about CRM:

• Do you sell high (>100k) or low-cost(<10k) solutions?
• What size is your audience?
• How large is your internal team?
• Is customer-acquisition mostly marketing-driven or mostly sales-driven?

  Very rarely would I propose a first-generation cloud CRM product like Avectra or Salesforce. Especially the latter – it’s for big orgs. If paying a CRM implementation consultancy 100k+ to customize your CRM sounds bizarre to you, then Salesforce is not for you.

With a few exceptions, though, that doesn’t represent most of you. I address small-team entrepreneurs who move the needle using expertise.

If that’s you, you should look at Pipedrive, Hubspot, Zoho, and hybrid tools like Monday (Project Management & CRM software) or Mailchimp (Email marketing and CRM).

But even the lean hybrid solutions start to look like overkill. And they just don’t get used. So for years now, people have turned back to spreadsheets, where a single Google/Microsoft Sheet functions as your de facto CRM for a given project. And then 6 months later, another sheet becomes your new de facto CRM for who knows what kind of project or process.

This leads us to one of the business truths of our age – if a large group of businesses uses spreadsheets to do the same type of thing, there’s a business opportunity.

When I was writing marketing copy, I can’t tell you how many times I’d ask – “Are you sick of using spreadsheets to do ______“?

It’s a fair, relevant question, as is the converse question:

If your prospective customer base isn’t using spreadsheets to do what your solution does, then is there really a need for your solution?

In other words, the business pain your prospective customers are experience has to be present enough that they’re turning to spreadsheets to solve it.

Even with 10’s of thousands of brilliant software products and innovative consulting processes on the market, millions of businesses still use spreadsheets to do some things. I certainly do.

Here’s the problem though as it relates to CRM. If you provide specialized B2B solutions you have ~6,000 prospects. And they should be in your CRM. And you can’t manage 6,000 data objects in a spreadsheet.

SmartSheet was one of the first to see the problem of over-reliance on spreadsheets. They provide a template library that includes a lightweight CRM implementation of their product.

But Notion and especially Airtable do this best. You might pay a professional to create their CRM implementations they label, “templates”. In fact, if I had to answer this question in one word instead of 500, it might be, “Airtable”.

But that would be followed by an at least 500-word conversation 🙂

Kind regards,
Rowan