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Never Compromise When You Can Collaborate.

June 3, 2020August 22, 2019 by Megann

If you’ve ever tried to create something or solve a problem as part of a high-functioning team, you know that conflict is practically unavoidable. Add a looming deadline, a commitment to an important client, or a boss who just won’t take no for an answer, and there’s a lot of pressure to come up with a solution.

There are a lot of different ways to solve conflict – the Thomas-Killman Conflict Mode breaks it down into five key methods. Their model includes a matrix where one axis is assertiveness, and the other is cooperativeness. The four quadrants break down as follows:

Competing – that’s where each of the parties wants to “win”. Usually that’s a no-win for everyone.
Avoiding – is where the risk to one or more parties of being hurt by the process is high, so they “turtle”. Does that sound like a satisfactory outcome?
Accommodating – people want to “keep the peace”, right? Sounds like a good idea. Except when the result is that a few bullies learn that they can continue to run the show, while the simmering resentment begins to build, and build, in the others.
The fourth is Collaborating – and we’ll get back to that in a moment.

What about compromising? Isn’t that the best approach? Maybe not. And here’s why.

Compromising sounds okay, for sure. It’s fair, right? Well, it’s fair – in both the good, and the bad sense of the word. It’s a little like the difference between equity and equality. Compromise may seem like an acceptable solution, but often it is the solution that gives everyone exactly the same amount of sway, but ultimately provides a weak solution that leaves everyone disappointed.

So how do you Collaborate? Very carefully. It takes time. (Remember that point at the top about maybe there’s a looming deadline?) Earlier models for conflict resolution also talked about the axes being people-driven, or time-driven. And while there’s no right answer, suspending the time deadline does increase the likelihood of collaboration. Collaboration is arriving at a co-created solution, where everyone feels heard, their ideas are validated, and then, if they must back off their position, they feel that it was at least given careful consideration by the other members of the team.

If time really is of the essence, then the solution may not be to leave it up to consensus decision-making. You may have to rely on a decider, and then return to the collaboration table to discuss less time-sensitive issues. (This is why design sprints usually appoint a decider – someone who has the final say, if push comes to shove).

So the next time you have a group decision to make, if you know there will be lots of strong wills in the room, leave enough time for collaboration. If there isn’t enough time, appoint someone to decide, and move on. In situations of critical importance, sometimes every kid doesn’t get a valentine.

I’m Megann Willson and I’m one of the Partners at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to help them see everything they need to make better decisions – including facilitating collaborative decision-making by teams, leading sprints, and helping them decide which framework best suits the kind of decisions they need to make. If you and your team need help doing that, send us an email, and let’s set up a free call. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and for more news you can use to help you or your team to ask more questions in ways that will let them make better decisions, click the handy button, below.

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Forget storytelling. Try storyshowing.

April 17, 2020August 13, 2019 by Megann

Photo by klimkin via Pixabay

There’s a lot of attention being paid to storytelling these days, as a way to gain customers’ attention and sell more product. That’s not what I’m going to talk about today, though. Today I want to talk about how you can use stories to build empathy and gain a greater understanding of customer problems and motivators.

In today’s business environment, there are two things that are in short supply: money, and time. The consequence of this, is that in the rush to meet deadlines, get answers, make decisions, and ship our products and services, soft skills may go out the window. Regularly surveying customers can get us an abundance of data, and data’s what we need to get answers. To make decisions. To validate that the solution we want to give the customer is right, so we can win, or fail, fast.

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, first of all, in the hurry to find out why customers are doing the things they do, or what their problem is, or how we can fix it, I’m seeing all too much blunt-force questioning. Clients ask me to ask their customers or prospects why they buy. Or they want to ask the customer to tell us how they can solve the problem that same customer is having. Trust me, if they knew, they’d be solving it, or at least trying. Or, clients want to ask questions like the example in this post.

Sometimes, when product or marketing teams or UX people want to get really creative, they ask the customer to tell them a story. They’ve been told not to ask why, and someone has sold them on the idea that storytelling is a great tool to capture customer experience, or the customer journey. If you want to know why asking why doesn’t work, even on ourselves, watch this great video about introspection and self-awareness from Tasha Eurich.

So what can you do? If asking the customer to tell you a story isn’t always effective, and you can’t ask why, and you can’t ask them how you’re supposed to solve their problem, what is the solution? Look at the picture above. The one kid didn’t say to the other, “tell me a story about that”. She asked, “show me.”

Instead of seeking storytelling, try using storyshowing. Ask them to show you where they’re running into the problem. Sit with them while they demonstrate what’s going on. Share screens, or better yet, go to them one-on-one and observe. Listen carefully. Interrupt with questions that involve “what happens when that happens” or “tell me more”, but sparingly. Seek clarity, not certainty. Take good notes, make sketches, record if the situation allows. Here’s an Innovation Game© called Me and My Shadow that explains a bit about how this works.

We like to add another step. Ask if you can tell them the story of what you saw, in your words. Ask them to be your editor. When they change things, ask them to explain the reason for the change. Then, and only then, let them know that you’d like to share that with your team, so you can come back to them with some fresh ideas. Resist the urge to solve the problem today.

If all of this seems like it is fiddly, and time-consuming, it is. You’re not gathering big data; you’re gathering rich data. And in our experience, rich data will yield a richer result.

I’m Megann Willson and I’m one of the Partners at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to help them see everything they need to make better decisions – including better ways to ask the questions that will gain them a richer understanding of their customers, users, and stakeholders. If you need help doing that, we do that, too. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and for more news you can use to help you or your team to ask more questions in ways that will let them make better decisions, click the handy button, below.

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Drum Roll, Please. Here are the Best New Ways to Get Customers.

May 19, 2020August 8, 2019 by Megann

Modern marketers need modern methods.

Am I right? You might think this article is going to spend lots of time talking about building pipelines and creating conversion funnels, using social media to generate leads and attract prospects with content, mining data to unearth new insights, and more. Do read on, and see if you’re right.

Do you remember last week’s post, about how something may resonate with you, and then suddenly you’re seeing it everywhere? Sure enough, that happened to me. (I checked my bias, though, and validated – these things do work).

First, I was speaking with consultant and coach Debbie Adams of PeopleCan about how, despite the many tools we have at our disposal, some of the best and easiest sales come because we’ve already impressed the customer, and we aren’t listening carefully enough to realize it’s time to stop selling. I also overheard a conversation between two business women and one was asking the other about getting new customers, when privacy regulations seemed to be making it harder and harder to use email. “It’s easy, said one. I phone them.” Cold-calling is sometimes most effective because it’s simple and unexpected. And it makes you take time to think about the person on the other end of the line, before you begin – at least if you do it well. (For more info on how to do that, check out The Phone Lady – she works with entrepreneurs and enterprises to help them get better at using the phone). Lastly, to use Steve Willson’s favourite F1 quote: “Get in there, Lewis!” In other words, go to where potential customers are. Have conversations. Engage. Show them you’re a real person. You’ll be pleasantly surprised on one-on-one outreach will help build momentum in your business. So, in short, three tools that are underused and can freshen up your sales numbers?

Listen carefully for clues that people you know are already ready to buy.
Pick up the phone and call.
Go out and meet prospects in person at an event that interests them.

Oh, and one more tip about the customers you’ve already found? In this post by Devin Haman, he says that you can come up with more things to sell your existing customers, by proactively fixing problems today’s proactive customers may not even have discovered yet.

I’m Megann Willson and I’m one of the Partners at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to help them see everything they need to make better decisions – using better data, a better approach, or better metrics. If you need help deciding which metrics will work best for you and your team, so that you can find, serve, and keep more customers, we can help. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. For more news you can use to help you or your team to make better decisions, click the handy button, below.

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Down with Puppies!

April 17, 2020August 1, 2019 by Megann

Photo courtesy of kevsphotos on Pixabay.

This was one of our most popular posts of 2019, updated just for you.

Earlier this week, one of our LinkedIn connections posted about a video from SAP about experience management. Agency folks were all over it, how moving and motivating it was, how it should be nominated for a Cannes Lion (puppy?), and so on. This reminded me about how I learned when I first studied copy-writing, that desperate marketers who couldn’t find anything distinctive to say about their product just had to use a photo with girls in bikinis, or a puppy. Yes, sorry, that’s what we learned, and yes, they called us girls, and, well, none of that really matters so much as the fact that these tired tactics still persist, and I got annoyed. Sigh. Stay with me. There’s more to the story.

On the advice of someone I know, I have been re-reading Ann Handley & C.C. Chapman’s Content Rules. So here I am at lunchtime, reading along, and I come to a part where the book talks about Eloqua’s “The Conversation” series, and how the video begins after a visitor indicates that she works in marketing. “Obviously I’m not going to be able to use any of the typical marketing tricks on you (sex!), so allow me to just be direct (puppies!).” The version of “The Conversation” that’s online now isn’t quite the same, but it is still a great example of interactively drawing someone into a conversation about your product with engaging humour, even if you have a serious B2B product.

That’s a useful thing to learn, for sure. But the lesson is not, “use a puppy”.

There’s a bigger and more useful lesson here. And here it is: when we see something that excites us, makes us laugh, or riles us up (have you guessed which one applies to me, when I see a puppy ad that isn’t actually selling something directly related to puppies?), the emotion sticks with us. And then, we may start seeing that thing that excited, amused, or enraged us, wherever we look. It’s a bit like the “frequency illusion” – our heightened awareness of that thing means that the frequency with which we see it seems to go up, even though in reality, this type of confirmation bias may be causing our brains to just confirm what we want to believe – that we are seeing those puppies everywhere. We unconsciously start looking for them, so we can prove to our brain that our theory is right.

So the next time your team gets a great idea about what your customers want, and you start seeing evidence everywhere, take a step back. Try using one or all of these tools to check your bias:

1. Ask the customers directly how they feel about your platform (or puppies).
2. Look at the data – have they ever shown an interest in puppies before?
3. Run a test to validate (or invalidate) your hypothesis.

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Narrow your research, if you want to go deep.

May 28, 2020July 11, 2019 by Megann

“We’d like to investigate this. Oh, and it would also be great to find out more about this. And a few members of the team thought it would be really interesting to explore this.”

When your product is new, or your team is new, or you’re just getting started with your business, you want to know everything. When you’ve been thrown into chaos by an unforeseen event, the same can happen. Any market information could be useful. All customer insights might be relevant. As a consequence, we often meet new clients, new teams, or founders, who want to look at a really big basket of questions. Sounds fair, doesn’t it? They have a lot to learn. So what’s the issue?

The issue is that the other shoe usually drops, right about then. The client says, “And we really want you to do a deep dive on this.”

The fact of the matter is, giant companies who can afford massive amounts of data, may be able to afford to be wasteful with their investigations. They may be able to “go deep” on a lot of different topics, all at once. If you look carefully, though, you’ll usually find that there are many teams, each going deep on a topic or two. If your company is small, you risk learning a little about a lot, and a lot…about nothing.

How can you mitigate this risk? These four steps that can help:

Make some calculated assumptions.
Establish hypotheses to validate or invalidate with the respondents.
Look at some secondary data and see if you can’t do some narrowing down or elimination on your own.
Choose the slice that, if the answers turn out to not be as you had hoped, would have the worst outcome. If there are rate-limiting or business-limiting questions, get them out of the way as soon as possible, so you can turn your attention elsewhere.

So the next time you want to “go deep” in your customer understanding, narrow things down first. If you forget everything else, try this rule of thumb when you decide whether you want to look at something deeply, or in its entirety: Microscopes are tiny. Telescopes are big.

I’m Megann Willson and I’m one of the Partners at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to help them see everything they need to make better decisions – using better data, a better approach, or a better frame of reference. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. For more news you can use to help you or your team to make better decisions, click the handy button, below.

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Imagine Your Customers Forgot Everything They Knew About You…

April 17, 2020July 5, 2019 by Megann

…even the best parts!

Last night I saw the movie “Yesterday” with Himesh Patel, Lily James (oh, and a couple of other small names like Ed Sheeran and James Corden). If you like rom-coms, it’s a must-see. Do bring some tissues. It got me thinking, though, about how often clients make assumptions about what their customers know about them. If you have a B2B relationship, you may have a long sales cycle. What do you do in between? How will they remember? Could someone slip in and broadcast your entire catalogue of hits without anyone realizing it was actually created by you? (I’m giving away a lot of the plot here, but trust me, there’s more to the story).

If you have a product with a long cycle, you need to think carefully about how to keep those big-ticket customers engaged. One way, of course, is to send them emails or connect using social media or other types of communication. It’s also worth engaging anyone they interact with in between purchases, like customer success, service and support, shipping, or even (yes, I’m going to say it) the billing department. As an aside, we once worked with a partner of ours on a win-loss project, and the billing department was responsible for a number of lost accounts, because they were more concerned about maintaining their process, than developing one that was easy for customers.

There’s a lot of push marketing in all of those activities, of course. Plenty of KPIs and other dashboard inputs. But what if you really engaged them in a conversation that wasn’t focused on selling? What if you let them talk about their objectives, what they want and need, their struggles, what’s important to them? Two ways to do this are to

create a customer community, or
build a customer advisory board.

What’s the difference?

A Customer Community is a place where your customers can come together and engage in conversations with each other. And it had better be interesting, because no one, especially not your customer, wants another long, boring meeting, virtual or otherwise. Really, do you even want to invest in something where your customer puts the phone or laptop on mute and pays more attention to their cheese sandwich? The best communities let them contribute something, learn something, see that you trust them to talk to each other and engage with one another without you trying to drive the conversation.

In a Customer Advisory Board, they know that the goal is for them to help you sell more product and do a better job of delivery. It’s more focused, and may even involve their strategic advice about how and where to recruit more customers just like they are. They might provide insights into buying cycles, responses to changing industry regulations, and more. They may even introduce you to someone else who should become a member.

Every business wants to find more customers, and to use research to understand customers – but keep customers? It’s surprising how little time and effort they invest beyond good old push marketing tactics. That might just be the thing that can sets you apart.

I’m Megann Willson and I’m one of the Partners at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to help them see everything they need to make better decisions – using better data, a better approach, or a better frame of reference. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. For more news you can use to help you or your team to make better decisions, click the handy button, below.

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What are we deciding, exactly?

May 28, 2020June 26, 2019 by Megann

Business people expressing different opinions

One of the challenges when there has been pent-up demand for action, is that if a team comes forward to figure out the way forward, each member has his or own stake in the decisions as well. Everyone brings emotions, needs, agendas, perspectives, and old wounds to the table. That’s why it is so important to ask this question at the outset, and to not move forward until there is agreement:

“What are we deciding?”

Then, if the process gets sidetracked by the many agendas at the table, or an individual needs to be heard, or something else takes the conversation in an unintended direction (as it invariably will), any member can get things back on track by asking, “What are we deciding, again? Let’s park everything else that doesn’t relate to this direct decision, and get back to those items once we have decided.” This is a way to refocus the conversation on the decision, separate from people’s individual needs, yet without suggesting that any of the “sidetracks” are invalid or not worth discussing.

I’m Megann Willson and I’m one of the Partners at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to help them see everything they need to make better decisions – using better data, a better approach, or a better frame of reference. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. For more news you can use to help you or your team to make better decisions, click the handy button, below.

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Fix Weakness, or Showcase Strength?

May 19, 2020June 6, 2019 by Megann

Last night, I was at an incredible power networking and launch event for women in healthcare here in Toronto. Congratulations to #HBAToronto on such a successful kickoff! I did have one thing that troubled me, though. One of the speakers was talking about all the guilt, remorse, and feelings of unworthiness that we sometimes deal with.

Don’t get me wrong: we all need to take time to be vulnerable; my friend Anne Day expressed this so well in her Company of Women blog. What we don’t need to do, is focus so much energy on what we feel is wrong with us. We can be vulnerable without feeling any of those terrible negative emotions: simply say, “I need help with…”. I would also add to this, that experience has shown me that most women have had enough training and conditioning to focus on weaknesses, and we can spend too much time on fixing them. Weak spots don’t need us to look at them; indeed, to mend them, we must firmly attach them to something much stronger. So if you have a weak spot you’re worried about, instead of spending all your time looking for how to make it “not weak”, find a strength you have, that you can use to bridge the thin spot, repair the crack, or patch the hole. You’ll find if you repeatedly do this, it will not only repair the weaknesses; your attention to what is strong, whole, and resilient will reinforce those parts of you as well.

I’m Megann Willson and I’m one of the partners in PANOPTIKA. We help clients to see everything and make better decisions. Stay strong!

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Abandoned Dreams, Big and Small

April 17, 2020May 31, 2019 by Megann

This week I was struck by the number of conversations I was part of, where business people (or entrepreneurs-in-waiting) minimized their ideas because they seemed too big, too audacious, or too outrageous. They had things they wanted to do, or to try, but they thought it would be better if “someone else did it first”. They wanted to create lists, and accountability check-boxes to go with them. They also had experienced failure before, or they were nervous about taking a risk, or making a mistake. Reflecting on this, I realized that there were three things that were consistently at the root of the problem.

The first issue was wanting accountability, instead of taking responsibility. I can’t explain this any better than Seth Godin already did in his blog, here.

The second was that even if they did set goals, they weren’t SMART goals. I’ve known about SMART goal-setting for a long time. Such a long time, in fact, that I am consistently surprised when someone fails to use this approach. Simply put, your goal needs to have each of the following elements:

It must be specific – I want to increase sales in my business.
It must be measurable. – I want to increase sales in my business by $1000 a month.
It must be action-oriented – I want to increase sales in my business by $1000 a month by adding two new customers.
It must be realistic – I am able to increase sales in my business by $1000 a month by adding two new customers, and I have already shown that I make an average of $2000 per customer per month, so this is possible.
It must be time bound – I will increase sales in my business by $1000 a month, by adding two new customers, within the next three months. I have already shown that I make an average of $2000 per customer per month, and it takes me 6 weeks to 2 months of selling to acquire a new customer.

See how the language became more focused and positive? This is how we can make things happen.

Lastly, a number the people I interacted with, were willing to let themselves “dream small”, because they could only see the big audacious goal, but didn’t know how to break it into small, manageable, do-able steps. “Every journey begins with a single step” may be a cliché, but in every old adage there is truth. My top tip of the day for this is to begin by imagining you’ve achieved the goal, and work backwards to see the steps you need to get there. It’s much easier to figure out the path, if you have in your mind that the success is already yours.

What’s standing between you and your big, hairy, audacious goals? Would you like more inspiration and accountability for your business? Stay tuned for announcements about upcoming webinars, courses, or coaching programs by subscribing below.

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