Songkick

I like to say that there are two things that motivate customers: fear and greed. 

Songkick, a web service founded in 2007, addresses a very simple and common fear: not knowing when one of your favorite bands comes to town.

I signed up for the service a few weeks ago and I love it.  It has a very slick and simple UI/UX.  You simply “track” your favorite bands and the site builds your own personal calendar of events.  It then makes recommendations for similar acts that you should track.  You can also import your favorite artists from Pandora, Last.fm and iTunes.  One thing I’d like to see them add soon is a second calendar that’s full of recommendations that you haven’t yet chosen to track.  That would be great for nights when you just want to see some live music but one of your favorites isn’t performing. 

Once you’ve setup your profile and created your own calendar, the system will send you an email when a show from one of your favorite bands gets scheduled in your area (I've already received a few of these emails and it's pretty exciting when you see one in your inbox).

In short, Songkick has executed very well on an awesome idea.  If you like live music, you should definitely take a few minutes to sign up.

Linking Credit Cards to Deal Sites

Fred Wilson had a good post yesterday titled, Syncing Up Your Credit Cards.  In it he makes the case that there’s tremendous value coming from linking our credit cards with innovative web services.  He uses BillGuard and Foursquare as examples. I posted a comment on the post that triggered a pretty interesting discussion.  My comment points out how I believe that linking credit cards back to deal sites creates an enormous market opportunity for better ‘deal making’ and better merchant marketing.

Rather than reiterate the comment, I’ve posted a screenshot of it below.  I’d encourage you to go back to Fred’s post as there’s some very interesting discussion happening in the comments section.

Jobs and Young People

I was talking to  a friend the other day about the value of children starting to work at an early age.  I think it’s a critical part of building and shaping a young person’s work ethic and eventual ability to create value.  As a young person working, you get to see the correlation between effort and return, understand the spectrum of hardworking people that produce and lazy people that don’t.  You build relationships, learn how to manage up, learn how to add value and how to get what you want from work relationships. Personally, my parents strongly encouraged me to work and work hard at a very early age.  While I’m sure I didn’t like it at the time, I know I can thank those experiences for the work ethic and ability to produce results I have today.

For fun, I took a couple of minutes to jot down some of the jobs I’ve had over the years (I tried to put them in somewhat of a chronological order).  I'm sure I forgot some so I'll add them as I think of them.  Regardless, I can't even begin to count the number of important lessons I've taken from each of the jobs on this list.

1. Newspaper Deliverer
2. Playground Supervisor
3. Altar Boy
4. Camp Counselor at a Baseball Camp
5. Dishwasher at a Private School
6. Babysitter
7. Dogsitter
8. Basketball Referee
9. Baseball Umpire
10. Landscaper
11. Mover
12. Snowplower/Shoveler
13. Waiter at a Nursing Home
14. Golf Accessories Salesperson
15. Dishwasher at a Seafood Restaurant
16. Lifeguard at a Lake
17. Parking Attendant
18. Swimming Instructor
19. Lifeguard at a Pool
20. Lifeguard at the Ocean
21. Fitness Center Supervisor
22. Certified Personal Trainer
23. Entrepreneur – Accounting/Bookkeeping Business
24. Office Manager
25. Advertising Salesperson
26. Marketing Director
27. Business Manager
28. Nonprofit Co-Founder
29. Director – Business Development
30. Senior Director – Business Development

3 Elements of a Marketing Email

Here are three very simple things that should be included in every marketing email you send.

1. Value Proposition (why should I care?)
2. Call to Action (why should I click?)
3. Urgency (why should I click right now?)

Ideally, they’d appear in that order.

Scaling an Internet Business

I built the chart below to illustrate a few points about internet businesses.

1. The chart shows the virtuous cycle that comes from sites with user generated content.  YouTube's and Facebook's products are their users.  Their users generate videos and photos that make the site more valuable.  More value, more users, more value, more users.
2. This cycle doesn't exist as cleanly for deal sites.  Their product is deals that come from salespeople.  If they want more deals, they need more salespeople.  That's expensive (they have 4,000 of them).  Certainly, more users make their salespeoples' pitch better, but that cycle doesn't happen neatly.
3. Groupon has a a huge advantage when it comes to conversions.  People come to Groupon to shop; their deals (i.e. ads) are their product.   Conversely, people do not come to Youtube and Facebook to shop.  Their ads are a distraction.  Because Facebook and Youtube make money by distracting people from what they want to do on their sites, Groupon arguably has a more sustainable model.
4. Because Facebook's and Youtube's products are their users and Groupon's product is their salespeople, it's interesting to think about how much incremental value their engineers are adding.  Youtube and Facebook are mostly made up of engineers.

When you build a consumer internet business, don't assume that it's going to happen like it happened for YouTube and Facebook.  Think through whether your value will build on itself or if you need to buld it incrementally, the old fashioned way.  It's also crtical to think through where your scale is going to come from: users, salespeople, or engineers.  The answer isn't always clear.

Drip Marketing Framework

A colleague of mine drew this framework on our whiteboard the other day.  I thought it was spot on so I'm posting it here. It basically outlines the drip marketing process that a salesperson uses to keep a prospect engaged.  I wrote about Drip Marketing in an earlier post.

The framework instructs you to drip the prospect with some information, if you get their attention work to understand what matters to them, if you know what matters to them align your product/service (if possible) to meet their need/pain point.

It's Not Viral Marketing

I wrote about this in an earlier post, but I think it's worth a reminder. Viral Marketing is not:

Telling your friends to Tweet about your new site.

Posting about your upcoming concert on Facebook.

These are simply modern ways of doing old fashioned push marketing.

Viral Marketing is when:

1. one person tells two people about your product (3)
2. each of the two tells two more people (7)
3. each of the four new people tell two more people (15)
4. each of the new 8 people tell two more people (31)
5. each of the new 16 people tell two more people (63)
6. each of the new 32 people tell two more people (127)
7. each of the new 64 people tell two more people (255)

You get the idea.

Viral marketing is when word about your product spreads, naturally, like a virus; and frankly, without much effort from you. Other than making the product worth talking about.

Your Social Network Asset

Currently I have about 80 followers on Twitter, about 500 Facebook friends and about 500 LinkedIn connections.

There's some overlap between networks, but more or less with a few keystrokes I can send a message to 1,000 people that trust me and are attentive and willing to listen to what I have to say.

That is an asset. A social asset. Not only the captive and trusting audience but the ability to communicate to that audience in real-time, whenever I want and as often as I want.

Like any asset, I can make it more or less valuable over time, either by losing or gaining audience, losing or gaining trust, or losing or gaining attention.

I think it's worth thinking about this for a few seconds next time you want to post something you want people to support. Will it make your social network asset more or less valuable?

Email and E-Commerce

Fred Wilson had a post last week called Don’t Forget Your Logged-Out Users where he discussed how social media sites need to pay attention to the value they create for users that aren’t logged-in; i.e. Twitter allows you to see Lebron James’ Tweets without logging-in.

This is something I’ve thought about a lot in the context of e-commerce.  You need to be very careful about what value you provide to a user before you force them to authenticate (i.e. force them to give you their email address). 

Most web services drive the majority of their traffic through email – especially repeat traffic.  As a result, email capture for a new visitor is critical.  It’s hard to get a user to your site, it’s even harder to get them back – in most cases you need their email address to get them back.  An email address allows you to regularly market to that user to bring them back when you have a better or more relevant offer for them.

So when you think about how much value you provide to a user that isn’t logged-in, you need to consider the potential missed opportunity to capture that user’s email address.

I’ve found that when you put up a authentication page before allowing a first-time user to shop, you lose about 20% of visitors; most users came to your site to see what you have and they’re willing to take an extra step to see it.

I’ve also found that when a user comes a site, there’s about a 5% chance they’ll transact on the first visit. 

Think of it this way:

Scenario 1 – Authentication and email capture before user can shop

1,000 New Visitors

800 New Email Addresses

40 Transactions

Scenario 2 – No Authentication before user can shop

1,000 New Visitors

50 New Email Addresses

50 Transactions

Here’s the question to consider when making the decision on how much value to provide to users that aren’t logged-in to your e-commerce site: what’s more valuable to you, 10 transactions or 750 new emails?

Career Insights

Picked up a couple career insights that I thought were worth posting here:

The first comes from a study from the Gamut News via Penelope Trunk's blog.

The study looks at what they call "Career Limiting Habits" or (CLHs) -- habits that prevent professionals from being successful. They surveyed 972 people and found that these CLHs were the most common:

1. Unreliability
2. “It’s not my job”
3. Procrastination
4. Resistance to change
5. Negative attitude

I think this list is spot on.  And it's especially true for startups.  It's almost the exact opposite of a list of habits required to work at a startup.  A top 5 list of positive work habits required to work at a startup would look a lot like this:

1. Accountable for individual and company results
2. Willing to do anything to get the job done; gets hands dirty
3. Starts fast, iterates like crazy
4. Embraces change
5. Positive, must-win attitude

Even at a larger, more established company, if you're practicing any of these CLHs you're making your manager's job harder and if you're making your manager's job harder, you're not going to go very far.  

The second couple of insights involve working with headhunters and come from a guest post on Dan Schawbel's blog about personal branding. Dan is a fellow Bentley alum.

Two pretty straightforward insights that might be useful to know:

1. A headhunter will not find you a job if you are not currently employed
2. A headhunter will not find you a job if you're not working in their area of focus; e.g. if you work in pharmaceutical sales and the headhunter is looking for a candidate for an advertising sales job, the headhunter will not work with you

This isn't to say you can't get a job in ad sales if you're working in pharma sales.  But a company isn't going to pay a headhunter 30% of a first year salary for a candidate that isn't currently employed and working in their defined area of expertise.  They don't need a headhunter to land that person. 

If you find yourself looking to make a career change, your best bet is to work through a more traditional staffing agency, go to companies through your network, or reach out directly.

Client Management Lesson #2: Partners, Not Customers

This is the second post in a seven part series on Key Client Management Lessons. Lesson #2: Partners, Not Customers

It may seem like semantics, but I’ve learned not to think of my clients as “customers”.  It has a connotation that implies that you’re inferior to the client.  You’re not.  A buyer/seller relationship is a perfectly mutually beneficial partnership.  You want something, they want something.

Your role in the partnership is to maximize the benefit to your organization and your partner’s role in the partnership is to maximize the benefit to their organization.  If you don’t approach it this way, you’re not playing the game -- the “self-interest game” -- and you’re setting yourself up for failure.

It is this joint self-interest that creates the magical “win/win” -- where you both get more from the relationship than the sum of your combined assets.

Positioning your relationship as a partnership can be difficult.  Clients are paying you a lot of money, they think of themselves as customers, they expect you to jump when they say jump.

To be sure that the relationship is positioned as a partnership, as soon as you take over the account, setup a call with the client and do two things:

1. Define the objectives of the relationship (be sure the objectives are aligned with your business goals and theirs)
2. Define the key metrics that will determine success or failure in reaching the objectives

This is a critical step; it forces you to view the success of the partnership through the lens of business success and "win-win", rather than the lens of client satisfaction or happiness.  Happy clients are important, but they should be happy because you’re helping them reach their business goals, not because you’re treating them like a king that you’re in business to serve.

When a “partnership” is in place, as you move through the relationship and opportunities, challenges and conflicts come up, you can always refer back to the objectives and metrics you’re using to determine success.  This will keep you both focused on actions that drive business results rather than non-essential activities that take you off course.

Client Management Lesson #1: Lead, Don't Follow

This is the first post in a seven part series on Key Client Management Lessons. Lesson #1: Lead, Don't Follow

Intuition tells us that the customer is always right, that good customer service is giving the customer what they want.

Whenever I hear this I think about a quote I read from Steve Jobs.

A while back somebody asked him if he had done any market research while he was building one of his products (I believe the iPod).  His answer was no way.  He said:

"It isn't the consumer's job to know what they want."

I love this quote.  In my experience, I've found that this is absolutely true; most clients have no idea what they really want.  In fact, even you probably don't truly know what they want or at least not what they're going to want.

In order to truly serve a client you need to have the flexibility to be ahead of the market.  And to do this, you need to create an environment with the client where you can do what you do well, where you can lead, where you can innovate.

Remember that you are the expert in your field, you're better at what you do than they are, that's why they 've chosen to outsource to you.

The best relationships are the relationships where a client leans on you for your expertise.  To create this type of relationship, do these four things right up front:

1. Specifically define your area of expertise for the client (where you're going to lead)
2. Define the metrics you use to determine success in that area
3. Set goals for each metric and a timeline for when you plan to hit each
4. Share those metrics with the client and demonstrate how those metrics are perfectly consistent with the overall goals of the relationship

Positioning your relationships this way might be difficult at first -- many businesses have been successful by following their clients,  and doing whatever the client asks.

But if you want to create an environment where you can truly innovate, you need to lead, not follow.

And you’ll find that once you've created this dynamic in the relationship you can move much faster in the market and the relationship will benefit in the end.

You’ll find that rather than being just another vendor that they have to manage, the client will come to you for advice, open up more about their challenges and be more understanding when you run tests and make rapid product iterations that don't succeed overnight.

To facilitate a relationship where you lead, you might need to be more proactive and more transparent than you normally would.   It's worth it.  Show the client data that supports your decisions.  When the relationship is positioned properly, you'll find that the client will require much less control.  In fact, when they ask you to make product changes you can say "no way!"

Of course you need to listen to the client and consider their feedback and you better be prepared to show how the changes you make are consistent with the goals of the relationship (again, try to do this proactively) but at the end of the day, you’re the expert, lead, don’t follow.

Your job is not to give the client what they want; your job is to give the client what they dream about.