Its a cold dark world. When you find a warm light, even a small flicker cup your hands around it and enjoy the warmth. Nurture it - if its a candle and the wax is almost gone transfer it to a new candle so it can continue to add light to the world. Science, numbers, logic makes me feel warm because it is easy to internalize ones answer as right or wrong. The answer to the math question is either correct or incorrect or, the function you write has the correct output that you need or it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter how you got to the correct output. For most things in life and business, it only matters that you got to the correct answer for a particular problem. Solving any kind of problem - even small and trivial ones always makes me feel warm inside and adds flicker to my flame. Recently I have found myself in an odd position with a problem I am uneducated for and unprepared to solve. Selling my skill set and experience to a range of businesses with unique problems regarding the internet. I like the web and I want to work with web technology to create solutions for problems people have on the internet. Be they large multinational companies or small niche businesses. They all have problems related to the web that need to be solved. Sure they may have trained themselves or their employees to deal with the pain that are symptoms of these problems. They have processes that mitigate risk and strategy’s that workaround most of the corner cases. The savings to the bottom line ensure that this will likely continue because that seems to be the path of least resistance. The opportunity here is for someone who can identify the source of the issues and not the symptoms and then focus on fixing or improving the process in a way that doesn’t require multi-year and multi-billion dollar initiates. Multi-billion dollar initiatives are especially problematic for smaller businesses not yet in the global billion dollar sales market. So this odd position that I found myself in involved my seeking out people to talk to them about their web problems with the desire to provide a solution. Help if I could or advice if I could not. Being traditionally educated in science and having worked with instruments and technology for a while, my first approach was to provide a list of solutions to the problems I have experience working with. Content management, manipulating graphics or data to present it or store it in novel ways; basically telling the stories of products and companies in the internet with the end goal to increate their profit and by making some type of a sale. This is such a narrow view of what the web is but it was my view until I met with a professional salesman. Someone who has years of experience talking to customers and bridging the gap between customers and technology products. I pseudo gave him my pitch over lunch. I had worked on the language of the slides, memorized them and I had tweaked them based on what I knew and what I thought businesses would need or want to know. In one sentence he invalidated everything I said.
How do you know?
How do you know what they (the potential customer) wants or needs right now? “Duh, I thought. That makes perfect sense. Why didn’t I think of that?” As a light bulb went off in my head. Everything I had worked on and put together to that point was based on my assumptions and my world view of solving problems that I knew already existed. I think I am pretty open minded but here, in this space my vision was narrowly fixated on the assumption that I know more than the customer does. But, as he asked me, “How do you know?” And the answer, of course, is that I don’t. I can’t know what the customers problems are unless we can talk about the customers state of affairs (on the internet) today. I can never truly identify the root cause of an issue is unless I ask enough questions in a way that transcends preconceived notions of what others know or the political ramifications (ie corporate blame games). If I am unable to neutrally identify the root cause then I have no hope of figuring out an acceptable solution. For instance, ask “Why?” instead of “Why do you think..?” Why takes less time to say and lets the customer explore the problem for themselves. This is much more useful than telling the customer that they solution X because it’s easy to do Y with it. How do I know X is a problem? I don’t. He then when on to give me some valuable suggestions for one area that might be common with small business owners: their website. Start with a conversation about them. They don’t care about me - why should they? So ask them about their website and see where it leads. (it helps to also have done a bit or research before hand … on them and their competitors) Start with some leading questions that will allow them to open up to a person who knows and understands the internet and has a sympathetic ear. Are they happy with their site? Is it still meeting the original goals and objectives? Do they do their own market research and check out the competition? Is there anything that the competition has that they want? Colored their way of course. These are a few examples to start the conversation but could easily be changed for different markets or types of customer. What these questions do is let the customer open up to you about the little things that cause them pain. Individually not enough pain to force them to address the issues, but when summed up together, all at once, with someone who knows about that pain they might be open to hearing about advancing their technology to solve some of those issues. The benefit of allowing the customer to open up leads the discussion to things most important to the customer. This is very valuable to both the customer and the salesman. If whats most important to the customer aligns with what the salesman can provide then there is a mutual interest, a common ground to explore the problem space more in depth and decide if working together is going to be mutually beneficial. If not, both parties will figure it out and move on with little time wasted. If I don’t know what the customer wants, then any advice I give or solutions I provide are going sound pre packaged and hollow at best or condescending and elitest at worst. In trying to sell my skills with web technology, the most important skill I have is the ability to listen and empathize with the little things that kill. Most people do not get worn down by one huge thing that saps all of their energy or takes all of their time during the day. It’s death by a thousand cuts over the course of the day. My job is to identify the cuts I can prevent for a customer and provide a reasonable solution that will address the problem, not put a band aid over it until tomorrow so they can get cut again.
