Tag Archives: Seth-Godin

Paying for Insight

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I’m enjoy­ing Seth Godin’s lat­est book, Linch­pin: Are You Indis­pens­able?. In his chap­ter on “Becom­ing the Linch­pin”, he has a great dia­gram on page 52, which I’ve repro­duced here. His linch­pin dis­cus­sion is a good illus­tra­tion of the vari­ance between price and value. I always cringe when a client reacts neg­a­tively to my billing rate (which is low for the indus­try). If they say, “I wish I could bill my time at that rate,” I know they haven’t got it and may never “get it.” I want to ask them what rate they pay their mechanic or their accoun­tant. It’s a ques­tion of the value con­tributed, not the price paid. This is the prob­lem with peo­ple who try to do too much tweak­ing on the prod­uct of a good designer… they don’t under­stand that they’re pay­ing for exper­tise and then negat­ing its value. Per­haps they’d rather have an expert at min­i­mum wage?

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The Talking Pad — And Why 3x5’s Rule

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I will often doo­dle dur­ing meet­ings… not so much “tak­ing notes” as just jot­ting down impor­tant phrases or con­cepts from the dis­cus­sion. Some­times a dia­gram, that sort of thing. This is just one of the rea­sons why when I redesigned my busi­ness cards, I went to to a 3×5 for­mat with the reverse side set up for draw­ing, doo­dling, or note-taking. Seth Godin explains some of the finer points of the why and how this is a good idea.

To See What You’re Missing

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card2207 A recent Jes­sica Hagy Dia­gram caught my inter­est (do the ol’ click-to-enlarge thing), remind­ing me of things I’ve said before about think­ing dif­fer­ently and chal­leng­ing assump­tions. It’s an impor­tant process and one I fancy as a kind of spe­cialty of mine. In approach­ing any chal­lenge, I’m con­tin­u­ally try­ing to see it from a dif­fer­ent angle in order to get the nec­es­sary per­spec­tive to see the solu­tion, whether it’s con­ven­tional or not. Along these lines, the other day Seth Godin wrote about the sci­en­tific method,

If you enter a con­ver­sa­tion look­ing for some­thing to test, mea­sure and ulti­mately change, it's likely you'll find it. That change makes you more com­pet­i­tive, and you con­tinue to cycle past your com­peti­tors. On the other hand, if you enter a con­ver­sa­tion con­cerned about main­tain­ing the sta­tus quo, it's likely that this is exactly what you're going to do.

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Let the Customer Exclude Themselves

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I was read­ing Seth Godin talk­ing about What to do with spe­cial requests, 632229_decisions_no_thanks and as I often do, related it back to my own prac­tice to see whether I was doing the same thing or some­thing dif­fer­ent, and why.

When I was in the gen­eral insur­ance indus­try, clients with a poor claims record or high-risk prop­er­ties were quoted higher rates and/or higher deductibles. Some­times very high… but we tried not to say “no.” Some­times clients would accept the rates or terms offered, and some­times they’d just keep shop­ping and place their cov­er­age elsewhere.

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Setting A Book Free

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Some­times a book needs to be set free. tribes_cover When I received my sec­ond copy of Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, it was with the pro­viso that it be passed along. Any­one who pre-ordered the book and joined Tri­i­ibes (as I did, though I don’t hang there much) was sent a sec­ond copy of the book as a gift and told to pass it along to some­one who needed to start a tribe.

I did this, and it’s a good exam­ple on Seth’s part of giv­ing some­thing for free in the inter­est (at least par­tially) of increas­ing sales. More expo­sure to your mes­sage, even for free, in the short term will mean more ongo­ing sales in the long term. It’s Seth Godin putting his money where his mouth is (before the fact), and I agree with him on this one. Appar­ently, so did his publisher.

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