[Sigia-l] Just wrote an eBook: LESS

[Dave Collins]

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Bruce Kasanoff

>Would love to hear feedback from fellow readers of this list.


It is a good read. What I scanned from it was interesting enough for me
to print it out and read further. 

First, the down side. My second thoughts (after being intrigued) were
skeptical. The examples you provided about what a company might do to
gain a competitive edge seemed somewhat idealistic and might not hold up
under load.

For example, many of the techniques you suggest involve anticipating the
customer's needs ahead of time, for example, "customers will come back
weeks later and order a specific product ... save them time and tell
them about it." It sounds great in principle. In reality, companies are
very aware of the benefits of upselling and/or value-added selling. 

Of course, they claim to just be trying to help the customer. And since
every customer has unique needs, we might as well give them the
opportunity to be sold as many of their specials and possible. But now
the customer is overloaded with offers, in their email, the take home
documentation, and every other nook and cranny. Who is to say how much
is too much? And you run smack into the opposite customer complaint: I
want less paper/advertising/sales!

Many of the techniques are already a staple of the corporate sales
repertoire, and they don't come out as clean-smelling when put into
practice. Partly because, to make them effective, they must hit a
certain critical mass or saturation of use for their cost/effort to
begin returning effective results. And that saturation has, for the
company, a threshold higher than that of an individual customer.

I think the problem is that as a company grows, it will be able to keep
a smaller and smaller portion of them happy in a smaller and smaller
fraction of ways. You just can't please everyone all the time.

Now, I realize that a specific refutation specified on my *own* terms
doesn't invalidate your principles, especially since they are described
so briefly as examples. So I recognize that your point still stands
valid and illuminating.

In fact, I think more than a company philosophy it makes a good personal
philosophy - an antidote for information overload and for big business
bureaucracy blues. In addition to pinning up my hardcopy here at work, I
may well just pin another one up at home...

Dave