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Two valuable lessons learned from an asshole.

Photo from Unhindered by Talent

The most valuable lessons in my professional life have often been delivered by assholes. One of the toughest was given to me in the summer of 1991 about my copywriting.

I was interning at the Detroit office of the Carlson Marketing Group, the loyalty marketing behemoth. I just finished drafting direct mail copy for Chrysler dealer incentive trip to Hong Kong, and was quite proud of my 20-year-old self. That was until I was called into the office of Haul Quarier, one of their account executives.

Haul was one of those agency types nearly the end of his second wind of his career in automotive marketing: angry and old with a false sense of entitlement. Haul was a classic asshole.

“Curt, your writing is clever, but complete shit,” he said bluntly. “Do you know why?”

I sat there for a moment, stunned, and meekly replied: “Bad grammar?”

“Really?” He snorted, called in one of the copywriters and spent the next 10 minutes reading all of my copy to both of us. “You should write for Conde Nast, not us, Curt,” said the copywriter with laugh and left me sinking deeper into my chair.

“Wow, you’re still not seeing it,” Haul blurted with a laugh. “You’re not writing to the Ambercrombie & Kent jet setters. You’re writing to Chrysler dealers. Quit being clever. Rewrite this with a dipshit dealer from Des Moines in mind, and give me the new drafts first thing tomorrow.”

So I spent the night channeling the persona of that dipshit dealer Mortie. I wrote why he should want to hit his service shop goals so that he could take his wife, Margie, to Hong Kong on Chrysler’s dime. And most importantly, I saw his painful point.

I put the new copy of Haul’s desk the next morning, but I should have left a thank you note as well. That past-his-prime account executive gave me two great lessons:

    1. Always write to your audience. Your content must engage them instead of showing off your writing acumen. Your prospect cares about their interests only, not how great your company/product/mad writing skills might be.
    2. The best advice is often best deliver bluntly and by assholes. A little pain and embarrassment are often required to shock us out of our internalized comas.

 

While I never will like Haul Quarrier, I’m eternally grateful to him every time I’ve seen others make this major mistake in their writing, and I still pull no punches when tough lesson have to be shared.

So take a moment today to review what you’ve written this week from the perspective our your readers. What have you seen?

MinneBar 2011 Presentation

MinneBar is one my favorite annual events. it’s evolved into the largest barcamp event in the US, and this year more than a thousand people a spent a beautiful Saturday indoors at the Best Buy campus.

It’s un-conference format always provides thought-provoking sessions on a wide range of topics from development to marketing to even personal rapid transit this year. Unlike many conferences, this one is pretty lean on bullshit and the attendees are largely developers.

Here’s the raw footage from my session: Five Marketing Points to Tackle Before You Start Coding.

Unfortunately, we did not pass around the microphone so the audience’s questions weren’t captured. The slides from this session can be snagged here.

Huge thanks to Ben Edwards, Luke Francl and Adrienne Pierce for another great event!

How to bootstrap your brand.

Over the years, I’ve meet too many entrepreneurs who spent unnecessary cash on crappy company and product names. They hired ‘branding gurus’ who didn’t understand their target market, the tech industry, your company vibe — or worse, they really didn’t care.

There’s no excuse for a half-ass brand, no reason to settle for something that doesn’t excite you and your customers. Let me be clear: brands matter, even in the B2B tech world. With all of the noise that distracts your prospects, you need a strong brand that cuts through it all while aptly capturing your essence.

And yes, this is something you should do yourself, for few others know your products and prospects better than you. In other words, bootstrap your brand before you pay money to someone else.

A few weeks ago, an Israeli entrepreneur asked for my help dreaming up a product name. Knowing his nonexistent budget, I gave him the following 5-step, quick-n-dirty branding process:

More at:

 

Seven Deadly Marketing Sins of Exporting #7

This is part of a series of seven posts. The first can be found here.

#7. underfunding your efforts:

One of the most frequent questions that I get is how much is this going to cost. I usually replied by asking: how long is a piece of string? Without knowing the expectations of the client or selecting the best target market for their products, it’s an impossible question to answer.

The truth is that you don’t need to spend $10M to generate sales in the US, but you can’t expect to spend only $10K either. Unfortunately, there are no set formulas for marketing and sales budgets.

Your must tie your sales and marketing budgets to your revenue goals, and scale them down to what you can afford. As I mentioned in my last post, it will take you 12 to 18 months to reach those goals. And if you don’t plan so or underfund these efforts, you’ll likely fail.

So where do you start?

Many governments offer export assistance programs. Israel, for example, has one of the best: Israel Export Institute. It has to be — over 45% of Israel’s gross domestic product (GDP) is from exports. These programs offered trade missions to targeted countries, access to grants and matching funds, and sometimes have staffs who truly understand the industries that you’re within or smart enough to at least find out. And if you’re lucky, it’s all free.

Are these programs perfect? Not always, but they offer a starting point for you to make the connections, get the funding and expertise that you need — especially if you’re trying to enter big markets like the US.

So before you make your first trip abroad or spent loads of money, see what resources that they can offer to you.

Seven Deadly Marketing Sins of Exporting #6

This is part of a series of seven posts. The first can be found here.

#6. giving up too soon:

Too many companies enter the US with unrealistic expectations, impossible timelines and focused on massive gains. Many think like this: if the US semiconductor capital equipment market is $15B, we should be able to double the size of our company in a year, if not six months.

Those same companies also tend to leave disappointed with small fortunes wasted, and many egos in the trash. They dream too big, and their failures are equally large.

The US market is huge, but it’s also hugely competitive. It’s best to start small with modest expectations, and this is often very hard for any company founder/CEO to do.

You need to plan out at least 12-18 months before you start seeing any significant return on your investment. You also may need to add in time for some product redevelopment — remember that your products are created for your market initially, not the US.

Make sure that you plan all lead generation efforts, business travel and other costs to be spread over this time frame. And then add another 15% just in case.

While your sales and marketing plans must be flexible to accommodate surprises, whatever you do don’t deviate from them. And keep your expectations in check, or you will leave US frustrated with the smaller bank account.

Net Sin: Underfunding Your Efforts