A familiar scene unfolded in the boardroom today. My team met another company, and we discovered we were both trying to sell to each other.
It wasn’t a good meeting. In a company, the people who sell things are rarely the people who buy things. The result was like pushing two opposing magnets together – an awkward hour that failed to generate meaningful actions.
Why does this keep happening? It should be obvious – I’m pitching you my product, and you’re considering buying it. Or vice versa.
I’ve decided the root cause is that some companies consider sales a dirty word. Instead of admitting they want to pitch a product, they talk about exploring partnerships, looking for collaboration opportunities, or learning more about the industry.
Selling is not an evil act. It’s a noble profession. But wasting everyone’s time through hidden intentions seems quite evil to me.
When I joined my current company, I was assigned a personal assistant.
I had never worked with a PA before. And frankly, I found the idea antiquated. Didn’t we throw out PAs with the fax machines? Hadn’t these people heard of Calendly?
But as the weeks passed and I fell into a rhythm with my new PA, I got it. And I’m now a total convert.
In fact, it’s crazy we don’t have ten times as many PAs.
A good PA can manage the diaries of 4 or 5 people. In doing so, they free those people to do what they were hired for.
PAs are drawn to the role because they thrive on tasks requiring organisation and attention to detail. These are exactly the things that the rest of us are happy to see the back of.
Tools like Calendly can’t solve the biggest headaches – scheduling meetings when everyone is unavailable. That’s where the horse-trading skills of PAs come to the fore.
And no travel system matches a real human getting things scheduled according to pre-agreed preferences.
Call me antiquated, but I feel this is something AI and software can never truly replace. Long live the PA!
If you’re launching a product or service and you’re tempted to write an FAQ, stop.
At this stage, you don’t know what your users will struggle with, so your FAQ would be a list of assumed questions. This is the curse of knowledge in action.
Even if you could predict the questions, wouldn’t it be better to improve the user interface or manual, so the user is no longer confused?
An FAQ should be a last resort. Write one when real users keep struggling with something. And view it as a temporary stopgap while you redesign those problems away.
More specifically, I decided to become the kind of guy who walks up escalators. I embraced it as an identity change, not a behavioural change, and it stuck
Now, when I approach an escalator, I get a thrill. I charge up the left-hand-side and emerge victorious at the top.
Nobody applauds. They probably think I’m crazy. But I don’t care. I love it.
Today, I’m trying again. I’m now the kind of guy who blogs every day. Let’s see how it goes.