BankerVision

"How Hits Work": Talk Next Thursday in London

Next Thursday evening in Central London, with some colleagues past and present, I'm going to be presenting some of my work that's going into a book I'm calling "How Hits Work". The event is being run by Spigit, the enterprise innovation platform company. I've been invovled with Spigit for a few years now, and they're the platform that power both Innovation Market at Lloyds and IdeaStreet at the Department.

The basic premise I'm exploring in my presentation is hits - those massive, immediate product successes that just take off - almost never happen because of radical innovation. That's counter-intuituve I know, but the mechanics of hits aren't easily explained by traditional innovation theories.

Traditional theory around the way new ideas spread suggest that mass media messages - like advertising - effectively target those individuals with a particular affinity for trying new things, who then communicate their successes or failures to other, like minded people. After a while of this happening, there is enough communication going on that expansion of the idea becomes self sustaining. That's the critical mass point that people always talk about, and it takes time to get there, because it takes time for people to communicate their experiences with each other.

But hits don't seem to work quite that way. They get to their critical mass point very quickly, much more quickly than this traditional approach would seem to allow. How is it possible, for example, that a revolutionary movie can become a hit in a single weekend? Why was the iPad an overnight success?

In every single case I can find, hits are the result of taking a well understood process, technology or service from some other, adjacent market and repurposing it in a new application. There is nothing innovative about the product or service or technology: the innovation is all in the way its applied.

On the other hand, truely groundbreaking, amazing innovations without precedent are rarely hits. That's why Microsoft, with the highest R&D spend in the industry and more truely innovative things in their labs than practically everyone else, is trailing Apple. Apple  know how to take commodity, tried stuff and apply it in new ways.

There's more to it, of course. In pratcially every case of a hit, there's been something else also present, a twist which reinforces the unique application. There are only a few possible variations on the twist, actually, 5 that i've identifed thus far.

I'll also be presenting some interesting cases: Microsoft versus Apple, of course, but also the the TV series Glee, the rise of Steam and its defeat by Diesel, and thje story of the man that invented the diode that made wireless possible -and never made a penny.

Anyway, that's the topic of my talk on Thursday evening. Also on stage will be David Cotterill from the Department, whose going to speak about his innovation team and motivating innovation behaviour, and Steve Wakefield, who used to run Innovation Market at Lloyds.

I have 5 spaces, so ping me if you want a spot at [email protected].

Update: My seats are gone, but I am sure Spigit will be give me some spaces if I beg. Let me know if you missed out and I'll ask: [email protected]

Tricks Vendors Play

This is an extract from the second chapter of my next work on what the enterprise sale looks like from the buy-side. I've stopped writing "One Big Thing" temporarily to do this, because I'm of the view that a decent guide for enterprise salespeople - not written by a salesman -is overdue. Hopefully, there's some value for people in hearing a few stories about what its like to be sold to.

In this chapter of the book, I'm covering the difficult first meeting, how to get one, and the kinds of preparation we appreciate. And, of course, I'm looking at some of the things that vendors do which we actually hate.

Unless your organisation already has a relationship with the buy-side, getting the first meeting with an organisation can be somewhat difficult. On the buy-side, everyone is deluged with requests for meetings, usually to such a degree that the only way to get any actual work done is to refuse to see any vendors at all.

In the last chapter, I explained that usually, the wares of vendors have much less value to us than they do to the vendors themselves, so unless there is a specific reason for a meeting, we are usually not all that motivated to use our time speculatively. We put up barriers to guard our ability to meet our internal objectives, because however much we might like to see new and interesting things, doing too much of it will get us fired.

So difficult can it be to get a hearing at the beginning of a relationship that vendors have resorted to a number of tricks that usually start things out on the wrong foot. Lets examine a few of these here.

Going to the Boss

One of the most effective ways to get a meeting with anyone in an organisation is to get to the decision-maker’s boss.

On the buy-side, we hate this passionately, and here is the reason. By seeing our bosses, you have essentially forced us to agree to meeting with you whether we have the time or not. We have to meet with you, because we must be in a position to report back to our bosses if they ask us whatever happened. And, of course, because the referral came top down, we are scared that if we don’t meet with you, you will go back to our bosses and complain.

It is even worse when an Account Director has somehow managed to extract some kind of agreement to do something from the boss.

The fact is most bosses don’t have the time to be across all the details of whatever the decision-maker is trying to achieve. Neither will they be aware of whatever else is presently going on that might be affected by whatever agreements the Account Director has managed to extract.

This puts the buy-side in a very invidious position. On the one hand, they want to support whatever calls their bosses have made, but on the other, they have to be able to achieve their goals by pursuing whatever direction of travel they’ve already invested in.

By extracting high level agreements, what you’ve essentially done is create an adversarial situation internally: you’ve made it likely the decision-maker will have to say “no” to their boss.

As you can imagine, this makes the buy-side nervous at best, and openly angry at worst. Not exactly a firm footing with which to start a relationship.

I was once in a situation where a vendor wrote a letter to my chief executive complaining that he’d had no success getting any meetings with any decision makers in our organisation. In this letter, he suggested that we “didn’t get it” and that we were “missing out on huge economic benefits”, and that the approach we were presently following was “just plain wrong”.

Faced with such a letter, what is a CEO to do? Naturally, the letter was immediately referred to us, and we were forced to explain - in detail - our reasons for pursuing the current direction of travel. We also had to agree to see the vendor, even though we expected the meeting to be a waste of time.

It turned out it was, of course. The product gave us capabilities we already had, and was, in fact, inferior. We explained this to our CEO, then blacklisted the vendor. Blacklisting, essentially means we’ll put up even bigger barriers to protect ourselves in the future, and the nett-nett is its unlikely you’ll ever get a meeting again.

This, by the way, is never something that happens on paper. We talk to each other, and the message gets around.  No-one on the buy side is stupid enough to write down a blacklist, but we do have our own jungle-drums that work very well, thank you very much.

The remainder of the chapter explains a number of other tricks vendors use to get first meetings (using Introducers, approaching personal networks, updating the sales pitch, and a few more). Then it goes on to explain what makes a good first meeting, and how to prepare for one. I expect the material to be available in full in about 3 months time.

An excerpt from my latest book

As I said a week or so ago, I'm busily writing a manual for enterprise sales people. Here's another excerpt, this time from the Introduction.

If you are an Account Director that’s responsible for selling to large organizations, you’ll be well aware of the traditional challenges involved in closing a deal.

You have to build strong and lasting relationships so you can get meetings with the people who can make a buying decision. You need to do so in the face of what is ordinarily quite considerable disinterest, sometimes even open hostility.

You have to make sure you get enough things in front of your customer that your pipeline is deep. You need a deep pipeline to ensure you have enough headroom to allow for the inevitable collapse of most of what you propose.

When you have, finally, got a deal on the table, you have to negotiate shrewdly in order to make sure you maximize your margins and extract the most value possible from your customer.

And in the end, ultimately, you then have to supervise every aspect of delivery, making sure you balance your costs so you do the minimum amount of work possible. You do the minimum you can get away with because that makes economic sense and maximises your margin.

That you do all these things in spite  of the fact that they don’t help your customer makes the relationship part of what you do completely, utterly false.

Nonetheless, some of you do quite well. My observation is that only the cleverest, most charismatic, of enterprise salespeople fall into this category.  You are great actors, able to delude customers into thinking that you actually care about them. Whereas the reality is that you think firstly about your number and what you have to do to make sure you hit it.

Whether you are a good person or not, this sets you up to lie in every interaction with your customer. You don’t care about what they’re trying to achieve, you care about what you have to achieve.

I’m not critising you, mind. The way organisations are structured presently, both on sell and buy side, you are forced to behave this way because it makes the best economic sense.

But the question I’m asking is this: what if things were different. What if you truly made the customer the centre of your world? What if, actually, you stopped lying in your interactions with them?

The Great Lie of the Sales Relationship

“Lying?”, I hear you ask?

Yes, lying, and here is why I make the challenging proposition that most enterprise sales people are extremely skilled at acting out the lie of their work.

Consider again the list of things enterprise sales people do with which I opened this chapter, but this time do it in the context of a real relationship, lets say with a personal friend.

You have to build a strong and lasting bond so you can get the meetings you need to pitch in the face of disinterest. A real relationship is never founded on disinterest - it is based entirely on common interests. Your friend is a friend because of the commonality.

You have to get enough stuff in front of your customer to ensure you have a deep enough pipeline to sustain deals that don’t go anywhere. In a real relationship with a friend, you’d never do this. A real friend would come to a mutual agreement about some course of activity - just the one - and would follow it jointly with you to an outcome. Friends support each other, they don’t play a numbers game to ensure they get to a personal outcome.

You have to negotiate shrewdly to extract the maximum value from your customer. If your customer was a friend, you’d be more interested in giving away your stuff, because you know that your friend would return the value as a natural consequence of friendship.

And finally, doing the delivery, you spend all your time making sure you spend only that amount of money you need to keep things on the straight and narrow. That’s cheapness, in the context of friendship. Imagine telling your friend you’re going to spend as little on them as you can get away with! Doing the minimum possible is a long way from going the extra mile, which is what a true friend would do.

Of course, enterprise sales is not friendship, but you can see how the activities of the enterprise salesperson can easily get really false.

You can’t on the one hand say you are successful on the basis of the relationships you build, and then go on to do everything that would normally bring a relationship to its knees. That’s why the best enterprise sales people are such great actors: they can make a customer believe in the relationship whilst simultaneously optimizing the outcomes for themselves.

I'm still seeking enterprise sales horror stories from either the buy-side or the sell-side. Right now, I'm looking for anything that has to do with mismanagement of evidence (ie, when case studies or customer references, or POCs have gone wrong), and blow ups when vendors have pitched "innovation".

The final book will likely be out in a couple of months.

The Vendor Manual on Customers

I do a lot of meetings with vendors. A lot of meetings. And, as you'll know if you've been reading here for any amount of time, I'm of the view that many of these meetings are (frankly) a waste of time. Not all of them, by any stretch, but a very sizable percentage.

I'm beginning to come to a realisation about this. Vendors who have always been vendors (i.e., they have never worked customer side) are usually quite poor at understanding the real issues customers face. They say they understand, but I don't think they really do.

I have no other way to explain the behaviours you get from them otherwise.

Anyway, I also do quite a few speeches to vendors giving the "customer perspective". Almost always, people come up to me afterwards to say that they didn't realise X, or hadn't considered Y, and that my material was really interesting.  I like to be candid in those talks, so I usually don't pull punches.

Anyway, since I completed The Little Innovation Book I thought I'd try to do something constructive about the vendor thing. Therefore, I've paused One Big Thing (my next innovation book for people who have only one shot at getting things done) and decided to write an insiders view of the enterprise sale for vendors. I don't really have a good title yet (suggestions welcome).

It'll be another short, 30k word work, split into commute-readable chapters.

So you can get an idea of where I'm going, what follows is an excerpt from Chapter 2, which is about the falsity of the relationship selling model.

I open the chapter by reproducing an exchange between an Account Director and myself in one company I worked for. It was a technology vendor, one that mainly sold bits of commodity tin. Here is part of the analysis I follow this with:

The second point of note from the exchange I had was the Account Director, whether it was deliberate or not, was setting up an adversarial situation inside our organization.

When IT (for example) has made a decision on something that is disadvantageous to a vendor, it is a fairly normal reaction to scramble to find someone with more power that will re-balance things back in the vendor’s favour. There are strong economic motives for doing this, of course.

When a deal goes the wrong way, the potential loss of revenue can be huge. That is revenue that has to be made up elsewhere, and means that new deals have to be put on the table quickly if the Account Director is to make up their number at the end of the year.

From the perspective of the Account Director, trying to stop this happening makes excellent economic sense. For most selling organizations, the number of opportunities to make the number is essentially finite. Wasting any of them can have drastic consequences for end of year compensation.

Then, too, it may be that there is a real belief that the customer is making a mistake. In this case, in the name of the “doing the right thing for the customer”, you often see this behaviour occurring.

Whether or not the vendor is actually attempting to set up an internal confrontation, doing so is another example of the falsity of the relationship sales approach. In a true relationship, vendors would never dream of putting their partners in a situation where they are in the middle of a fight. Friends don’t do that to each other.

But the economic basis of relationship selling makes it very difficult to avoid. Faced with the certainty of a significant loss of money, or possibility of putting a relationship into a place from which it cannot recover, most Account Directors are forced to choose the latter.

After all, if they are good enough at their jobs - acting (that their primary concern is customers, not their targets) - it will be possible, given enough time and effort, to convince the customer that they really do  have their best interests at heart. A brilliant Account Director can make the choice of money over relationship time and time again and get away with it. Poor Account Directors, on the other hand, do so only once before they get thrown out by the customer.

Setting up adversarial relationships in accounts is an overt case of a much more common behaviour, known internally to the buy-side as “divide-and-conquer”. Vendors, usually with pretty good intentions, go around to as many people as they can making their pitch.

There will be a pretty varied reaction to this. Some people are open to a new proposition, and will be supportive. Most will be disinterested. And some will be openly dismissive.

By seeing as many influential people as they can,  vendors are able to maximize the opportunities they have to create a groundswell of demand for their offer. Indeed, this truly is a numbers game, because with enough meetings, it is possible to sell anything to a large organization by virtue of the fact that sooner or later, there will be enough people wanting it that a purchase is inevitable.

Divide and conquer is hated by the buy-side, because it creates a situation where things happen that are outside the strategic frame. The result is many smaller deals going on, which can add up to significant overspend over time. In one company I worked for, there were twice as many software licenses purchased as there were people in the organization.

This is demonstrably bad for the customer, and demonstrably very good for the vendor, of course. It is yet another example of where a decent account director will almost always trade relationship for revenue.

I'm planning to have the full book out in about 3 months. I'm still looking for any vendor horror stories - from either the buy or sell side - which can add some spice. I'll keep your identities and organisations confidential if you wish.

iPad isn’t a thrill yet, but will be.

Like so many other people I know, I spent some time last night watching the live blogging from the Apple iPad launch event. Also, like so many other people I know, I was somewhat disappointed with what I saw.

The device itself, of course, is magnificent. It looks beautiful, it obviously feels beautiful, and the price, well it is a amazing. At that price - $500 USD - I’d say everyone who makes netbooks is in trouble. That, in fact, is the place Apple are pitching the device anyway. As a middle-man thing between your mobile and your laptop experience.

However, the fact of the matter is that Apple’s big product thrills only start to show up when they do their innovating in spaces aligned to the device they are trying to sell. I mean, iPad is magnificent from an engineering perspective of course it is, but that doesn’t make it thrilling.

We were thrilled with iPod because of iTunes and the seamless way it moves music from artist to the ears.

We were thrilled with iPhone because Apple made the shift from putting everything they could dream up onto amdevice to making it simple to put functions everyone else could dream up on the device.

I was hoping to be thrilled with iPad because Apple would make another play to move the stuff everyone else does  onto a screen in another unique way. They didn’t, and even iBooks is just a rehash of what Amazon is already doing.

Ultimately, the iPad is beautiful, but it doesn’t enable anything new.

I knew I’d be disappointed because the fact of the matter is Apple almost never get around to thrilling us with new in a first release.

iPod was released first in 2001, but Apple didn’t add the iTunes store to sell music until two years later.

And the first version of the iPhone had no AppStore at all. It was in late 2008 that Apple added that, almost two years after the first iPhone came out. Now “there’s an app for that” for everything.

So its reasonable to conclude that Apple (who lets face it are masterful manipulators of all of us), have left their powder dry on the iPad. There will be thrilling new ways to get stuff others do on screens. They’re coming, but we won’t have them for, probably, two years.

Everyone who is disappointed because the iPad lacks some gizmo – like a camera or multitasking – is looking for engineering thrills that change the game. But engineering so rarely does. Its always adjustment of business models around the engineering that does that.

And Apple aren’t stupid. They know how to play us. The probably engineered the whole hype thing just to disappoint us. They know their big, game changing play will turn all this discussion around overnight.

Its not like Apple are hiding anything here, either, since they practically told us what they’re going to do during the announcement: “We want to be at the crossroads between technology and the liberal arts”, says Jobs. In other words, wherever talent lives, and whenever it can be rendered on a 10” screen, Apple is going to be your distribution partner and manage your relationship with your customer.

It is a very grand play. And its one that Apple have had some experience in: they did it already for musicians and programmers and studios.

So, in 12 to 18 months or so, when they announce (probably as a sidelight to something else) their game-changer, I am very confident we will all be thrilled.

The innovation economy

You should read this article that argues another phase change is occurring: from a knowledge economy to an Innovation economy. It’s suggesting that even when you have great structural capital (factories, assets, and all that stuff), great financial capital (money!) and great intellectual capital (knowledge and know-how) you will still not be a successful organisation.

Nothing really happens unless you also have innovation capital,  which are the assets you build up that let you do value creation.

Now, of course, since the discipline of corporate innovation is still so young, we’re as far away from a decent system of valuation of Innovation Capital as we are from manned starhips that cross the void. At least with intellectual captial you can compare the difference between the book value of all the assets on the balance sheet and the market valuation of a firm and say “yep, that’s how much our know-how is worth!”.

This is a concept that resonates strongly with me. I’ve worked in banks and technology companies – both Lloyds and Microsoft for example – where all of the traditional assets were available in spades. How come, then, neither of these companies has truly produced anything that was game changingly value creating in the last decade?

Organic growth is not the same thing, even though its highly desirable, obviously.

I’m of the view that both lack Innovation Capital, and furthermore, that almost all organisations do. Lloyds has spent the last couple of years building its Innovation Capital up, and it may be we’ll start seeing some interesting new stuff eventually.

I’ve been away from Microsoft too long to have any insight about its capabilities in this area, but no-one is stupid there, so I’d not be surprised to discover they get this also.

Anyway, the point of al this, if its true, is that the role of innovation groups suddenly fits neatly into the value hierarchy of an organisation in the same way that accountants and marketers do.

But I’m also thinking that without a reasonable system for the valuation of Innovation capital, we’re going to be nowhere for a while yet.

Academics and other big-brained people… do you care to take on the challenge?

The stupid salesman

I hate to rant (again), but last week I met with a vendor who didn’t know anything about me other than my name and title, and who I work for. I put aside an hour or so to see him.

This, as far as I am concerned, is about as stupid as you get. Since I have gone to such lengths to put my thoughts on line and expose what I care about to everyone, surely you would want to have that advantage when you come to meet me? Is it so difficult to type “James Gardner DWP” into Google before you show up?

So I had the standard discussion about our strategy and goals, which is so generic as to be almost completely useless to anyone, and sent him on his way. He will not be meeting me again.

Of course, this goes to something I’ve been saying for a while, and that is that there’s this huge – and widening – gulf between those who are connected and those who aren’t. There is a visible performance gap between the two groups.

Apparently, though, there are all these people who are “too busy” to read blogs, keep up with Twitter, and participate online. I find, increasingly, they are missing the action.

Actually, as a side note, there are some people in my own teams who don’t bother to read this blog. I don’t even feel remotely worried that I’ll offend them by disclosing that, by the way, since they aren’t paying attention.

Anyway, so the sales guy didn’t get anything he wanted from me, which is a further opportunity to engage. Considering he’s a system integrator and wanting to sell services, what would I have expected him to know if he really wanted to talk?

1. He should have known that I think architecture should be firmly grounded in the business we’re trying to make go, and therefore, that' I’d care more about real things happening than models and theories.

2. He should have known that I care deeply about security, but I like a nice risk based assessment of things that lets us move forward rather than a process of shutting things down randomly the moment any potential threat comes up.

3. He should have known that I like strategies to have flexibility, and I hate ivory tower-ism. Strategists that won’t flex are as bad as security people who shut things for down for kicks or architects who are custodians of “the one true way”.

4. He should have known that I think you can build big and important results from innovation groups when you focus on many little things. And that doing a few very big things is the way to failure, since most innovations fail no matter what their size.

Anyway, a little research was apparently a bit too hard. Perhaps he “doesn’t have time” to read blogs and keep up with Twitter and participate in the conversation himself.

But never mind. That’s a sales guy that’s going to get fired, because there are any number of people who do their research before showing up.

As you’d expect, the conversation moves a lot faster once you get beyond “tell me about your role, your issues, and your goals”.

Evidence of the chip

A week or so ago, I wrote about the “chip” that some Microsoft employees seem to have implanted in their brains.

A couple of people contacted me to tell me the days of the “chip” were long gone.

Apparently that’s not the case, however. And here is the evidence.

Profile Microsoft evangelist Don Dodge was laid off, recently, in the latest round of cuts. As he says on his blog:

Microsoft announced more layoffs today, and I was one of them. This was a total surprise to me, and management offered no explanation. This is pretty standard procedure, mostly for legal reasons, but none the less left me with a cold feeling...but only for a minute or two.

Nice of him to be so level headed about the fact that he was just fired. Obviously, the chip is still inserted tight at this point.

A few days later, he is hired to work as an evangelist for Google. Seconds later, the chip has fallen out, and you get these remarks on his blog:"

Last week started a new personal journey for me. One without Microsoft. So, why not move forward without Microsoft technology, and try the new alternatives? Old habits die hard, but these were actually pretty easy to break…

I made the switch to Gmail last week and it has been awesome! Outlook has been an old familiar friend for years, but it was getting kind of tired…

Hey, isn’t this November of 2009? Why Word 2007? One of the nice things about Google Docs, and all web based products, is that they can be updated continuously with no interruption to you…

OK, now that I am no longer with Microsoft, I can admit I had iPhone envy. My Windows Mobile “Smartphone” didn’t measure up….

Thanks Microsoft Internet Explorer, but I’m moving to Google Chrome. Chrome starts faster, loads pages faster, and is easier to use…

Fake Steve Jobs, one of my favourite blogs on the internet, summarised the whole thing very nicely I thought, in a post where he calls Don a Borgocrat (Fake Steve refers to everything Microsoft as the Borg), and compares previous posts Don has made with his new position on products for the company.

If this isn’t evidence that the “chip” still exists, I don’t know what is.

A window into Microsoft

One of the most interesting things to read on the web these days is the comment stream on a blog from Microsoft insider Mini-Microsoft.

This is a blog based on the premise that Microsoft has grown too big, having hired too many people that don’t do very much except “play Microsoft”. Mini asserts this as the reason that many feel MS is unable to lead the market any more.

Naturally, one takes this insiders perspective with a grain of salt, and even more salt is needed when reading the comment stream: as you’d expect, it attracts the disaffected in the company, those with an axe to grind.

But I’ve noticed something so interesting in the years I’ve been reading it: there are far less people showing up with the “drink the cool-aid” mentality than before. I used to laugh, before, when MS people showed up that had so clearly been “chipped” by Redmond. Even when I worked there, it was a standing joke that we all had to go to Redmond to get our little chips inserted that would make us immune to any criticism of the company or its products.

I think the chip has stopped working.

In fact, when you read the comment stream, it is hard to stop yourself thinking that MS is imploding from within. Stories of terrible managers who are destroying the careers of their people. Product groups that are in permanent spin because they’re so lacking in vision. Management arrogance that fails to accept that the stuff going out the door isn’t really that good.

Most of all, the comment stream is a cry from the front line to save the company which so many have invested many years in.

Anyway, as I say, you have to read it with a grain or two of salt.

But if there’s one thing that I’ve always noticed about this comment stream over the years, it is an excellent barometer of Microsoft’s capability to execute, and it is counter cyclical to their success. Prior to the Vista bomb, lots of people with chips were around. Now, there are hardly any, so maybe it is reasonable to conclude that Windows 7 will be OK.

Prior to the release of iPhone, everyone in Windows Mobile had a chip. Now all you hear are stories in the comment stream of people who are switching to iPhone internally. Even though the new version of Windows Mobile is apparently terrible, perhaps it is a sign that the version coming next year will actually be decent.

Same with Live Search, which is now Bing. Mind you, there are chipped people starting to show up about that, so perhaps Bing is going downhill.

Pretty big lack of chip on the subject of Azure, the new Microsoft cloud service, so the first release of that might be OK. Or maybe noone knows enough about to have an opinion.

Everyone seems pretty chipped out on Office 10, so suspect that will be terrible.

Anyway, read the comment stream yourself and draw your own conclusion. Mine is that internally, there’s quite a bit of trouble at MS at the moment.

Personalisation dynamics

So yesterday, again, I got some more CVs stuffed into my inbox from a recruiting company that’s pushing its latest hot candidate.

The candidate was a “high level sourcing strategist” with years of experience in banking and financial services. Apparently, this candidate was especially good with cards, and had led massive cards transformation programmes.

The thing is, I don’t do cards anymore.

Interestingly, this email arrived to by government inbox, and correctly identified me as the CTO at DWP, so they must have at least a little bit of a clue.

That is just so annoying to me.

Firstly, I just hate unsolicited CVs, which are worse than ordinary spam mail because they release piles of personal information into the wild.

But even worse than that, I hate it when recruiters don’t bother to check their details before they contact me. I didn’t give them permission to come into my mailbox, so they have to earn the right before they can expect anything decent to happen.

So anyway, I called this recruiter and told her not email me ever again. And this was the exchange:

“Oh, sorry, we do it as a service. We think it is helpful for you to know the great candidates out there”

“His experience isn’t relevant”

“He’s still a great candidate”

“He doesn’t know anything but cards, which we don’t do”

“Well I have this other candidate….”

After a few more minutes of argument, I got them to remove me from their mailing list.

I suppose the recruiter was just doing their job, however badly.

But isn’t it interesting how some firms, who supposedly are all about personal service (when we hire a recruiter, they aren’t just shoving a CV in my face, they’re supposed to be about search), fail to understand the dynamics of the personal.

Here are the dynamics of the personal:

1. If you get any detail at all wrong about me, you’re deleted.

2. If you guess wrongly about what I want, you’re deleted.

3. If you dare to follow up after guessing wrongly and being deleted, you’ll get deleted again and then you’ll get blacklisted

4. If you get blacklisted and you still refuse to stay deleted, I will be on a personal mission to make sure you’re blacklisted everywhere.

This is not just me, by the way. I see it from everyone who gets touched by poorly done personalisation.

Considering the number of things that have to go right for such an outreach to work, I am surprised why companies ever spam anyone with poorly constructed personalisation. Certainly, it seems impossible that an organisation I’ve never dealt with before can ever know enough about me to get all this right. Even with the amount of stuff you can find out online.

Now, as to this recruiting firm, and this candidate, this value destroying exercise has eliminated much chance of you dealing with me again. But by all means spam my inbox and that of my colleagues as well. I can assure you the response will be predictable, and pretty much the same as on this occasion.