Business Development and BizDev
Independent consultants have it sort of tough. Don’t cry for us; the liberties we enjoy make it pretty awesome as well. But for sure the risk and uncertainty is balanced out (or sometimes, it’s not!) by the freedom to choose our hours and our clients…the work we do and don’t do. It’s certainly a lifestyle and you have to want to live this way to do this sort of work. There’s nothing wrong at all with the more corporate way of living (and I’ve done that plenty as well). It’s simply a matter of choosing what’s the right fit for you and what makes you happy. It’s a different type of work, and how you do it is not the same as when you’re an employee.
One of the things we independents do a lot is network. I’ve been, at different times, a member of several networking groups—some paid, some free; some very structured, some more ad-hoc. I’ve also done plenty of freelance networking by simply finding myself in places where other businesspeople congregate. I’m always on the lookout for new people to meet and new business experiences. I wrote a while back about how I’m a ‘greedy’ networker: I look for people with talents and experience my clients and prospective clients may need, that way I can help beyond my own skills.
It’s important to understand what others are trying to get out of the practice of networking. Once I was part of a network that would randomly match members up for one-on-one meetings; we’d go into each call without knowing the other participant. It was helpful at the beginning to establish what we were each trying to accomplish. One time the other guy simply said, “I’m just here to practice my pitch. Do you mind if we do that?” He wasn’t trying to sell to me (after all, he had no idea if I was a proper client for his services anyway); he just wanted practice. And here’s where we got to two real purposes of networking: biz dev, and business development.
Surely those two seem the same, but here’s where they differ: […]
Figure it out
I wrote a while back about a pet-peeve of mine when I grocery shop: Not enough small carts.
Now, that’s clearly a small thing (literally!) to get too overworked about. First World Problems, and all that. At the risk of delving further into Angry-Old-Man-Shaking-His-Fist-At-The-Clouds territory, let me gripe again about shopping carts.
As I’d mentioned, ours is a somewhat urban neighborhood. Now, we’re not “downtown” or in any sort of high-rise area…It’s one of those in-between sort of place where there are a mix of houses and businesses; sidewalks and alleys. But it’s definitely in the city, and naturally we have our share of vagrancy issues.
So, our local grocers have cart issues of their own: Homeless folks will often wander off with them. Now, there’s a mechanism they’ve installed that locks a wheel if the cart is taken beyond the parking lot. It’s a somewhat expensive solution the problem, and seemingly not totally effective, given the number of carts one can see abandoned within a few blocks of the store when the absconder finally gets frustrated with the impediment.
But not only is it not all that effective (although I’m sure there’s a study on it…perhaps it’s effective enough to justify its cost), it’s also a frustration for their Customers. I can’t tell you how often I get one of these carts with that one wheel locked inside the store because that mechanism is malfunctioning. Sometimes it’s clear right away and you can abandon it right there at the front of the store. In fact, usually if there’s a cart or two not stacked in with the rest of them, but rather just out in the middle of that space, often that’s why: Someone else abandoned it right away. But sometimes it doesn’t go haywire until you’re already on your way and you either have to get another cart from the front of the store and swap all your so-far picked items into the new one, or somehow try to drag ¼ of the cart the rest of the way through your visit.
My previous article, linked above, simply asks why certain brands haven’t figured out some of the inconveniences their Customers have. Now, here’s an admonition: They should figure it out. […]
On the other hand, maybe AI will NOT kill CX
I wrote the other day about what I thought was a conclusion drawn about the impact of automation and AI and all that stuff on CX, from a conversation I’d had with a colleague. Briefly, I noticed that, absent the incentive of increased costs (tied to increased Customer interactions, which, with automation would now not need costly humans to handle), the new technology would actually decrease CX in the long run because brands would be less driven to address the root causes of issues. Why spend the time, money, and resources, after all, if we’ve got robots to take care of all those messy cleanups, right?
Then I slept on it.
The next day I wrote back to my colleague and said, Wait a second… Not so fast. […]
AI will kill CX!
One Big Question I hear a lot these days is about AI and automation. “How will AI impact CX?” How the heck should I know? It’s clear I’m the one writing all these articles, isn’t it? I wonder if we’ll reach the singularity and the world will implode if someone uses AI to write an article about AI and the impact it has. Surely it’ll be a glowing review.
But discussions about AI are becoming boring to me frankly, simply due to their ubiquity: How will AI affect education? How will AI affect marketing? How will AI affect sales? How will AI affect dessert toppings? How will AI affect floor wax? (Hat tip to anybody who got that last reference.)
If nothing else, AI has brought back to the surface at least one of my longest-standing writing struggles.
Nevertheless, recently I had a very cool discussion with a friend of mine in the CX/UX space, and I posited the following theory, almost right off the top of my head as I was thinking it while I spoke:
AI may actually make CX worse in the long run, or at least impede better Customer Experiences. […]
What is your word worth?
I recently had a particularly silly experience with the US Postal Service.*
I mailed an envelope (containing nothing more than a copy of my very thin, light book) from Denver across the country to a client. The estimated arrival time on the east coast was to be two days. In fact, I sent two identical packages from the same place at the same time to two equidistant (from me) places on the east coast. One arrived exactly as promised. The other? A week and a half later (I spent that time bemusedly watching via the tracking on the USPS website as it made its way up and down the coast), it finally arrived.
So I called the Customer Service number and asked for what any other Customer in his or her right mind would request: A refund for their complete failure to do what they’d promised.
Their response?
“Sorry, sir, it’s just an estimate.”
Well, yes, I know it’s an estimate. You never know what may happen, after all. For what it’s worth, there was no force majeure during this time, but from time to time things will happen that are simply accidents or other issues. Packages slip between cracks, trucks break down, someone—I dunno—actually goes postal? Anyway… […]
I’m a greedy networker
I’m a selfish networker. But hear me out; I don’t mean it the way you probably think I do.
When you read that first sentence, you probably conjured in your mind a picture of that guy who shows up to the networking events with a bunch of his business cards, introducing himself around telling people what he does and asking, “Do you know anybody who needs that?” Or even, “Do you need that?” This guy’s out there, basically soliciting. And there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that.
That said, a professional networker (or one of those consultants to consultants) would likely say, along the lines of good vibes and karma, that it’s better to go into situations like that more with a sense of giving than receiving.
Well okay, but I’m still selfish. And here’s how I mean that: […]
