Bottom of the funnel

It’s easy to get focused on the public-facing mouth of the funnel.

More followers.

More impressions.

More buzz, hype, promotion. Get the word out.

Just about all the time people who call themselves “marketers” spend is on this. Don’t worry about what happens later, just pour more attention into the top.

But the math is simple:

Most of the people at the top leave long before they engage, buy or spread the word.

Which means that doubling your conversion is exactly the same as doubling the number of people who are aware of you.

It means that by the time you get to 20 people (out of 1,000) who are ready to become committed fans, each of these people is worth fifty times as much effort as you’d put into getting one new stranger to be aware of what you do.

Don’t send a poorly-written mail merge to your best prospects. Send them a handwritten note.

It’s not the bottom of the funnel. It’s the foundation for your future.

Seth Godin

Bottom of the funnel

Dreams, plans and contradictions

Dreams are fine. And dreams involve contradictions. We want this AND that, but both can’t happen. That’s what keeps them from being plans.

Plans embrace boundaries and reality, they don’t ignore them. Plans thrive on scarcity and constraints. Plans are open for inspection, and a successful planner looks forward to altering the plans to make them more likely to become real.

Seth Godin

Dreams, plans and contradictions

Market pressure

Every competitor faces pressure, and it varies by industry, consumer/investor segment and geography. This applies to services, products, ideas, organizations, jobs… whenever there’s a choice and a market. The pressure might push you to be:

  • Cheaper
  • Simpler
  • Dumber
  • More short term
  • Easier
  • Coarse
  • More convenient
  • Hyped

But it’s also possible to choose a marketplace that rewards:

  • Durability
  • Difficulty
  • Elegant design
  • Resilience
  • Thoughtfulness
  • Higher performance and efficiency
  • Patience

A real challenge is in trying to bring the desires of one segment to the other. That’s difficult indeed.

Choose your customers, choose your future.

Seth Godin

Market pressure

Them or us?

What kind of culture will we build? At work, in our community, online?

  • Compliance
  • Quality
  • Inquiry
  • Inclusion
  • Consumption
  • Possibility and/or
  • Fear

Each of us builds culture every time we interact with anyone else. Opting out isn’t possible, all we can do is decide what sort of impact and contribution we’re each going to make.

It’s tempting to say, “they” build culture, and to see that some have far more leverage than others. But it’s actually a “we” thing.

Seth Godin

Them or us?

The Marketing Department

That’s the first part of the confusion. It’s a group of people who can’t decide what the thing they do is supposed to be.

Is it:

Advertising

Publicity

Increasing retail distribution

Direct and measured response

SEO

Making the logo pretty

Wholesale and trade relationships

Maintaining the status quo and not screwing up

Keeping the website running

Positioning

Creating network effects

Community engagement

Strategy

Listening hard to market desires

Customer service

Customer delight

Quality metrics

Mass market promotion

Branding (whatever that is)

And seven other things we could name and argue about…

If people are confused about what they do, perhaps that’s why it’s hard to move forward. What’s this meeting for? How do we know we’re working on the right things? What’s important?

Call it what it is. Say what it’s for. Describe what you do.

Seth Godin

The marketing department

Responsibility and blame

It’s tempting to hand it to other people. If someone else takes the blame, if they accept the responsibility, then we get satisfaction and we’re off the hook.

Alas, this doesn’t work unless the others do the taking and do the accepting.

Which is unlikely. We’re giving power to someone who isn’t going to use it to make our day better.

It’s far more predictable and reliable to simply take it ourselves. At least that way, we can do something with it.

This simple shift gives us power and authority over our narrative. It helps us avoid wasting time on wishes and ever more ornate arguments about our version of things.

What can you build now that you have everything under your control?

Seth Godin

Responsibility and blame

But what if I’m wrong?

If we’re going to come together and invest the time in conversation, in research or in analysis, we should begin by understanding what would be required for you or I to change our minds.

If you’re not willing to consider that you’re wrong, then, in the words of a Dan Dennett, you’re a spectator, not a participant.

Let’s agree on the standards of proof, and then begin

Seth Godin

“But what if I’m wrong?

The worst person on our team

A common shortcut to cultural divisiveness is to find the single worst person in a different group and highlight and attack their behavior.

By making it clear and obvious that this is what THEY (the plural) want and who THEY are, it’s easy to walk away from a larger we. Their worst troll becomes their mascot.

And in a media-fueled culture that thrives on division, this is a convenient shortcut.

What happens, though, if we find the worst person on our team and tell them to chill out a bit. That people like us don’t do things like that. That their trollish, extreme behavior is magnifying differences instead of making it more likely we end up with useful cultural cohesion…

It’s surprising how much the outlier is willing to listen to the very people they’re counting on for support. And the folks you seek to win over are much more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt if you have a history of discouraging bad behavior.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about politicians, sports fans, entrepreneurs or activists. More extreme division is unlikely to sell our idea and gain the support we’re looking for.

Seth Godin

The worst person on our team