Be Different or be dead

February 8, 2021

6 easy ways to learn more and be more successful

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6 easy ways to learn more and be more successful.

Successful career development requires staying relevant and this means riding the knowledge curve: if you want more you need to know more.

If you want more success and rewards in your career you need to know more. Expecting infinitely more returns from your current knowledge base is unreasonable; there’s only so much more you can squeeze out of a sponge before you need a bigger one and before you must replenish it with water.

Yet there are too many people who are unsatisfied with their lot in life because they believe they should be able to leverage their existing knowledge base to produce more and more personal benefits. They think they should be able to squeeze more personal benefit from what they’ve learned in the past.

Whereas this approach may work for a while, at some point one has to replenish themselves with broader and different skills and competencies if their end game is to be more relevant and therefore have an opportunity to be more successful.

If you’re no longer relevant, you’re done for future opportunities.

These 6 tactics will help you build your ‘know stuff’ repertoire:

1. Knowledge frontier

What’s the new knowledge frontier? What are the growth sectors of the economy? Which way is the wind blowing in terms of new business opportunities and what skills do you need to possess in order to make a valuable contribution to their exploitation?

It’s not just about what you would like to do; it’s more about exploring what you need to do in order to be relevant in the changing world ahead.
For example, digital technology is definitely headed down the artificial intelligence path and bright people with AI knowledge are needed by companies that want to leverage it for financial gain.
So, if the job growth is disproportionately high in this sector you might want to find a way to play in it.

It’s critical you do your homework on this to discover what know-how will be sought after in the next few years.

Context for learning is critical; make sure your learning curve follows the skills and competencies curve of the economy — learn and stay relevant.

2. Career plan

Update your career plan based on your assessment of where industry knowledge needs are headed.
This is the step where you action what you discover in your knowledge frontier explorations.

For example, you may have been on a financial path and need to pivot to digital technology based on your frontier findings. If so, your career development plan needs an overhaul. Go back to a clean sheet of paper if need be; a new end game requires a different strategy to achieve it.

If you don’t build a specific career plan to exploit knowledge opportunities, you’ve wasted your efforts so far. And nothing will change for you.

Re-read BE DiFFERENT YOU! and a few of my blogs to make sure your career plan is solid and updated.

3. The Magic Question

Ask yourself the magic question as a way to focus your career plan pivot.

The MQ has always served me well in my career. I posed it every time I faced a job change: a new job, a demotion (yes, I had a major one of these), a lateral move, a new boss and so on.
And it guided me to make the right decisions that served me well.

”Now that I’m facing a change, what do I have to do differently” is a requisite for any pivot.

Failure to ask the question is deadly; asking it and getting (in retrospect) the wrong answer at first, but eventually getting it right, at least keeps you in the game. It just costs you time.

4. Someone else’s shoes

My experience is that the wealth of knowledge available when you walk in another’s shoes often goes undiscovered.
Cross training or stepping in to assume someone else’s responsibilities is not seen to be the amazing learning opportunity that it really is.

So look for the chance to do someone else’s job for a temporary period and you’ll be amazed at how rewarding the assignment can be.
Either you might learn that the temporary role is not for you, or you’ll discover some aspect of it that appeals to you and that might lead you to seek learning opportunities on a different track than you were originally on.

Learning based on practical experience in my view is far more valuable than textbook learning only because you learn theory from a real life situation rather than merely hypothetical possibilities promulgated by theoretical experts.

Practical learning makes knowledge real and so it’s much easier to retain and replicate.

5. Paper mentor

The world is at our feet through the internet; there is more online knowledge available than most of us could ever tap in our lifetime.

So, go online and find a paper mentor you can learn from.

For me, Seth Godin has always been an invaluable marketing mentor for me though I’ve never met or spoken with him.
But because he is a prolific writer with an incredible perspective on where marketing needs to go in order to remain relevant, I learn voraciously from his published work.

Find a paper mentor that is in the sweet spot of your career development plan and not only study them but also try to apply what they teach.

6. Young professionals

Go find a younger person who is doing what you would like to do (again, as determined by your updated career plan) and rub shoulders with them.
This is where you probably have to build yourself a new contact list.

Younger people are generally on the cusp of breaking new knowledge so they represent an effective lens for you.
But don’t make it weird if your chronological impairment — aka your age — outpaces theirs.

Find a way to hang with them (probably virtually to begin with), conclude that they have knowledge to offer that you need and then play your relationship networking card to get closer to them.
Who knows? You may even make a friend for life.

The fate of your career development plan rests in your head; whether or not you keep pace with knowledge trends, and your capabilities to implement your new-found learnings in real world situations.

But the truth is, it starts with new thinking and new skills. So, go find what’s hot in the learning space, soak it up and apply it with passion like no other.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 2.8.21 at 04:54 am by Roy Osing
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February 5, 2021

8 simple ways you can improve your marketing muscle

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8 simple ways you can improve your marketing muscle.

There are organizations that emphasize the role of marketing in their business plan. They are proficient at marketing who they are and what value they create.

They exhibit marketing effectiveness.

They have marketing muscle.

There are others, on the other hand, who struggle to get their message across and are not contenders.

Building marketing muscle isn’t just the job of the marketing department; the entire organization must take on the responsibility and work in harmony to deliver it.

Muscle-building routine

▪️Consistently WOW! your customers — Delivering awesome customer service is fundamental to building muscle; it’s the basic platform you need to build a strong sustaining brand. If you don’t serve your customers in an exemplary way (or at least have plans to), ignore the rest of this article.

▪️Lead with innovation — Be the first ones to do something creative and “out there”. Yes, it’s risky to try something new, but if you try often enough you will have the winners that add dimension to your brand.

▪️Surprise your market — Do something that people don’t expect. Muscle builders pulse surprises from time to time, creating buzz and attracting a great deal of attention.
And they don’t surprise just anybody; “delight tactics” are aimed at their loyal customers. Check out Richard Branson to see how it is done.

▪️Earn the customer’s business everyday — Don’t feel entitled to it just because you have it. This is all about never taking the customer for granted; assuming that since you already have them, you don’t have to do much to keep them.

This is a fatal mistake! Investing in deepening your relationship with a customer and earning their trust will not only keep them spending with you, it will also motivate them to “spread your word” to others.

▪️Integrate yourself in your community — People want to do business with organizations that care about the communities they are in; that give back in some meaningful way.

Muscle is built with a HUGE dose of humanity, and social investing is an effective way of allowing your softer side to be seen. And target community investments to programs aligned with your strategic plan; avoid trying to support every cause out there.

▪️Adopt customer learning as a core competency — Learn about your customers as a continuous process rather than a periodic task.

Customer needs, wants and desires change and it is critical to keep up. Muscle strength grows proportionately with how knowledgeable you are about who your customer is and what their top priorities are.

▪️Have fun! — It’s amazing how impactful it is to shed the business formality thing and show an informal playful persona from time to time. Casual language, humour and making fun of yourself are ways to show your customers “it ain’t all about the bottom line”.

▪️Think “ME” — Shift your thinking from mass production to personalized value creation. Narrow your focus to create solutions for small groups of customers rather than trying to come up with one size that fits all (which doesn’t work anyway).

Keep in mind that muscle form isn’t developed overnight; it can take years of blood, sweat and tears before the market sees you as a contender.

However, there is no time like the present to get on with it.

Define your muscle building program.

Start executing.

Don’t look back.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.5.21 at 10:48 am by Roy Osing
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February 5, 2021

3 simple ways to give the most brilliant customer service

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3 simple ways to give the most brilliant customer service.

If you want your customer service to excel, here are 3 essentials.

Essential #1 - set your strategic context to serve customers rather than ‘service’ them.

To provide brilliant customer service, your business plan must give it the priority.

We ’service’ cars and computers but we serve people. The notion of being ‘serviced’ is quite frankly repugnant to me.

Servicing people focuses on inflicting the rules and processes of the organization on the customer. Some analyst in the organization decides that the most efficient way to fulfill a customer’s request and control cost is to do it a certain way. Whether the customer wants to participate in the process is irrelevant.

Serving, on the other hand, requires that systems, rules and procedures are designed to satisfy the service experience expected by the customer.

It may be more cost efficient to outsource your call centre to some distant place in the world where english is not the mother tongue, but if a conversation with one of these reps infuriates your customer, what have you gained?

Too many organizations take this inside-out view of customer service where the needs of the organization are pushed on people.

What is needed is an outside-in perspective where the customer drives how they are served.

Essential #2 - deliver your core service flawlessly 24X7. Core service is the essence of your business; what people get from you. WiFi that works, good food, clean hotel rooms and planes that take-off and land every time are examples of core service.

If you deliver your core service consistently as promised customers will rate you average because they expect your core service to work as promised. On the other hand, failure to deliver satisfactory core service will earn you a fail and your brand suffers as the stories of your shortcomings spread far and wide.

Essential #3 - create dazzling service experiences around your core service. This is the WOW! that surprises people; giving them what they DON’T expect.

Dazzling experiences drive customer loyalty but only if your core service is delivered flawlessly

How to dazzle?
▪️Recruit people that “love” fellow humans and possess the innate ability to serve them.
▪️Create rules, procedures and systems that enable friendly and user friendly transactions.
▪️Turn OOPS! into WOW! by recovering from mistakes and service blunders in a way that surprises and delights the customer.

Don’t expect results over night; serving people in a stand-out manner is a journey.

But start it. Now!

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.5.21 at 06:40 am by Roy Osing
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February 1, 2021

3 easy steps to build a successful career plan

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3 easy steps to build a successful career plan.

Everyone needs to do career planning; it’s not good enough to wander through your working life and take whatever comes your way.
Yes, there are random events that impact us, but we are in a better position to respond to them and carve out a rewarding outcome if we have an endgame in mind.

There are many suggestions offered by many experts on how to develop a career plan, but the secret is to come up with an approach that works for you; that fits your unique capabilities, perspective and outlook.

I developed my own career game plan method. I didn’t want a boilerplate; I wanted something different that would focus on the practical task of implementation as opposed to having a grand plan that was good in theory and nothing more.

What I didn’t want was a planning framework that everyone else used that merely focused on the completeness of the plan; making sure that all of the boilerplate topics were covered, and expecting that success would come from that.

The process that I created — and worked for me from an entry level analyst position to president — was to build a path to your destiny by answering three basic questions.

What job do you want?

This question addresses personal growth — what specific position do you want and when?

Most people are vague when asked about their career goals: ‘I would like a position managing people’ or ‘I want to lead a marketing or sales team’.
These aspirations don’t feed implementation very well; they don’t direct you to a specific action plan. And a game plan that can’t be executed isn’t worth much.

To ensure your career efforts are productive, define the specific position you intend to get and when you intend to get there

It makes a big difference to the actions you take, for example, if you are interested in a VP marketing position versus a Sales Account Manager position.

Source: Pexels

And be as clear as you can on the organization you are targeting. Your game plan tactics will be different if you are interested in BMW as opposed to Apple.
Each has a different business challenge and a different priority on the skills and competencies they require.

An amazing benefit of focussing on the specific organization you want to target is that you amass a detailed understanding of each of the potential organizations you could be interested in, which is invaluable not only in making a decision on the one to put in your crosshairs but also to enhance your knowledge and expertise in the organizations you studied.

Too many career hunters are unclear on where they want to land, which is a normal situation for most people. The problem is, as long as you are hovering over a number of possibilities you don’t act. You ponder and reflect. But you don’t do anything to move forward.

It’s better to declare what you think you want today based on the best information you have available and your particular interests. Go after it. You will learn soon enough if it is the right path and you can then adjust your game plan on the run based on what you learn.

And keep your target date close in rather than in the distant future in order to force yourself to take action. I always set my sights on a position that I wanted within 24-months which compelled me to act now. It’s too easy to not act today when your target is 5 years away; there are too many reasons why procrastinating makes good sense.

The answer to question #1 could be — ‘I intend to land a sales director position with BMW by March 19, 2022.’

Who can help you?

Who are the individuals — the foxes — within the organization you’re targeting who influence decisions on who gets selected for various positions in the organization?
And further, who are the individuals who know someone in that organization that could introduce you to the foxes?

The fox in any organization is the key manager or executive that has the greatest amount of influence on a particular decision to be made.
If you’re in sales and have a potential deal in front of a client, the fox would be the individual in the customer’s organization who would make the buying decision.
If you are to win the sale, you need to figure out a way to make it stand out above your competitor’s in the eyes of the fox.

It’s no different in your career. The challenge you have is to sell yourself as the best person for the job available in a crowd of others who are also interested in the position, and you need to find the fox in the organization who has the most influence on the hiring decision.

Career game plan success means engaging with the right people to spread your word and get attention so you get the invitation to make your pitch.
I have seen many talented people fail because they did not cultivate the right channels to express their skills and experience.

If you covet the VP marketing position for TELUS, for example, do your work to identify who can help you, and ‘mentor up’ with these high currency individuals both within and outside the organization.

This is an arduous process because when you start, you are unlikely to know the foxes in your target and with your 24-month implementation plan you don’t have a huge amount of time to graze the field of possibilities. So engage your mentor — I presume you have a stable of them, right? — in helping you by using who they know to get you going.
I’ve also found LinkedIn extremely useful to increase your forward momentum as well. Be creative and explore every possibility.

These covet-the-fox practices worked for me:

▪️ Identify the leaders in the organization who are making the key business and people decisions today and are likely to be doing so over the next year or so. Foxes need to be carefully identified and targeted just as you would any other customer group that held the potential for your success.

You will be allocating a significant amount of your time and energy on them and you need to be sure that they have the potential to deliver significant benefits to you. If you choose incorrectly you will not receive the expected return on your personal investment.

▪️ Discover their expectations and secrets. If you have a deep intimate understanding of the fox, you are in a position to impress them and gain their support in a way none other can do.

The information that would be invaluable on each fox would be things like: what attributes they typically look for when hiring people, the questions they ask, details on their career path, the positions they have held in the past, their personal brand in terms of what they are known for — their strengths and weaknesses, external hobbies and interests and details on their family.

▪️ Market yourself with a broad range of skills and expertise that the organization needs to successfully execute its long term strategy; don’t flog yourself as a person having a narrow set of competencies. Select the particular competencies you have that address the key issues facing the organization.

They could include: MBA in marketing and finance, demonstrated achievement in building business strategy, changing a marketing culture from a product focus to be more customer focussed, building market share in competitive markets, improving customer service 25% over a 12 month period, external speaking engagements on competitive strategy and marketing, building strong teams and consultative selling skills.

▪️ Be proactive in discovering the opportunities that will be coming up in the organization. If you have a good relationship with the foxes this will aid the process. In addition, stay tuned into the informal communications network in your organization as it is often very effective in knowing when change is in the wind.

With an informed outlook of the possibilities, you can take whatever action you feel appropriate to take advantage of them should they arise.

The answer to question #2 could be — ‘I will focus my efforts on connecting with TELUS managers who are on LinkedIn as well as who are members of local communications networking groups.’

How can you beat your competition?

In my experience, this is by far the most critical question to answer and few career explorers do it well if they do it at all.

The issue is this: since competition for career positions has never been greater; you need to be able to position yourself as the most logical choice for the position you are seeking; you need to separate yourself from the job-hunting herd in some meaningful way that the targeted organization seems relevant.

The killer questions you must have a believable and compelling answer to is: ‘There are many applicants for this position; why should I pick you?’ and ‘What makes you special compared to others?’.

If your pitch doesn’t crisply identify the experience and competencies you possess that are critical for the position and how you are different from others, you won’t likely get picked.

My eyes glaze over when I hear ‘I have great interpersonal skills’ or ‘I have 10 years sales experience’ or ‘My people skills are my strongest suit’ when I ask people why I should pick them for the job

How do you go about answering the question?

It’s not about what your strengths are and it’s definitely not about the academic qualifications you have because I’m looking at 49 other candidates for the position you want and they are all saying the same type of thing.
What I’m looking for is a creative expression of how you are different from the other 49 candidates in a way that’s important to my organization.

I created ‘the ONLY statement’ as the way of declaring how someone was not the same as everyone else, rather how they are unique, special and unmatched in the crowd of people all covering the same position

When I was fighting my way up the ladder in a large telecommunications firm the ONLY statement I came up with was:

‘I am the ONLY one with demonstrated marketing experience necessary to successfully move the organization from a regulated monopoly to a competitive enterprise requiring an obsessive focus on the customer and delivering highly differentiated value.’

This statement was incredibly useful in defining the action plan I needed to win the competition for the marketing, sales, service and operations roles in the organization leading eventually to president of the data and internet organization.

Remember, though, to test your ONLY statement with friends and colleagues and have proof points ready to defend your words. It’s important to have people who know you to nod when you declare how you’re special and not be laughing under their breath.

The answer to question #3 could be — ‘I intend to compete with other potential candidates — and win — by being the ONLY one who has the sales experience to deliver both double digit revenue growth from my high value clients AND growth in their loyalty.’

Answer 3 questions in your career planning work and you have a game plan to start your career journey.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 2.1.21 at 05:29 am by Roy Osing
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