Back To Basics: Seth Godin.


Back in 2000, I downloaded the two hundred pages that constituted Seth Godin's brilliant Permission Marketing. Since then I've had the pleasure of attending his seminars and talks, and when I started blogging he generously warned his readers of that fact.

He writes shorter books these day and his new one Linchpin is published this month. It's about answering the crucial question of how you make yourself the linchpin of your market and/or your company. That ties in directly with the ethos of my "back to basics" questionnaire and I'm thrilled that he agreed to answer these five questions as well.

How do you get new business?

New business gets me.

This sounded unattainable to me for decades as I scrambled, often one check away from bankruptcy, to build a business, a product, an organization... but then, after a while, I discovered that people would contact me asking for this or that. The hard work isn't getting them to call, the hard work is breaking away from whatever pack I'm in, whatever ice floe I'm on and create an event or a product or an idea that people actually want to be a part of.


How would you advise others to do so?

Find 1,000 true fans. Earn the right to coordinate the actions of 1,000 people in a tribe. Connect and lead. Create ideas that spread, and find a niche small enough to be important in (but big enough to matter).

Do this while you're doing your day job (not easy). But if you do it a little, every day, for years and years, you'll find it. Which is a lot better than doing the hustle, every day, for years and years and not finding it.


How has this changed in recent years and why?

I think it's now clear that the internet makes this sort of connection and leadership significantly easier than it used to be. It brings with it more copycats and more competition, but it's still clearly a win.


How would your advice differ for someone who is just starting up?

I think now you get to skip a lot of steps that others used to have to take. Tickets that had to be punched. Now, you can start out fast, without paying as many dues. There's a big if. The if: you must have great stuff. Great ideas. Amazing art. Connections that work. Insights that people can't help but embrace. That's not easy, but in just about every segment, someone is doing just that.

Don't try to be the "next" of any successful person. That person is already occupying the slot. Be the next you.


How do you balance this with keeping existing customers satisfied and coming back?

People don't come back merely because you met spec. Lots of people meet spec. They come back because they got more than they paid for, more than they bargained for, and they're motivated to get even more of that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thinking about creating a blog (Part 2)...

If you are thinking about creating a blog for your organization, there is one thing I cannot stress enough: make sure those who will be contributing content have bought into your idea! I have created a couple of blogs for different organizations, and I must say that I have learned this the hard way. Don't get me wrong. I think that blogging is very effective if done right, but that is a really big IF. Many organizations launch blogs and don't do it right, and when the blog fails they blame it on the ineffectiveness of the technology. Readers of a blog don't want to get hit with your marketing messages! If you try a hard sell technique with every blog, of course your readers are going to start tuning out your blog. You need to offer your readers a reason to read your blog, and a way to do that is to offer exclusive content that they can't get anywhere else. This is the reason that while at Virginia Stage Company, I started to post video clips of rehearsal and "behin...
Read more

Marketing Awareness.

Modern marketers tend to get very excited by ideas of conversation and engagement with customers. Given that they are aware how many images and messages each of us receive every day, they have become less impressed by the more basic aim of generating awareness. This, I think, is why this pun-based campaign has received such criticism from within the advertising world. Some complain that the imitation of Morgan Freeman is a deceitful hijacking of the actor's gravitas while others just deem it trite, shouty advertising disguised as something else. But that is to overlook context. It's an ad for insurance. Insurance stubbornly remains a commodity business where price trumps service because we buy it before we need it. The engagement with the product/service occurs at a time of distress and not at a time of purchase. In a commodity business, awareness is key. You want your customer to have your name come to mind when they consider the purchase. It's brutally simple. A differen...
Read more

Thinking Inside The Box.

Image
A combination self-help and business book, Michael Port's Beyond Booked Solid focusses on scalability issues and how to expand a small enterprise. It is filled with pragmatic tools and techniques designed to grow a business via innovation and leveraged income, but the key message is that of developing a mind-set that works on your rather than in your business. To some extent that's just a reframing of the old adage of keeping one's eye on the big picture, but it's something that can't be repeated too often. Constantly reminding yourself and your colleagues of why you're in business (and specifically what customer needs you meet by doing something better than anyone else) is crucial to evaluating everything that you do day to day. If your marketing tactic du jour, your latest product development or your inter-departmental meeting isn't centred on that, they're not worth your time and resources.
Read more