A priori ROI: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Worry about it later, be a sucker instead of paranoid, existing customers are excellent customers
Still sick today, feeling much the same. This episode is another one with mostly content form elsewhere.
Detachment: tactics to stop thinking too much
We used to call it “compartmentalization,” which can have a bad feel to it. Anyhow, in this from Jessica de Bloom & Merly Kosenkranius:
Detachment is your need for psychological disengagement from effortful tasks, such as certain work-related activities or care-taking responsibilities. To experience detachment, you must not only stop the demanding activity itself, but also stop thinking about it, taking a mental distance. Switching off from these thoughts is important to be fully present in the moment and for regaining the psychobiological resources needed to tend to other life roles. Psychological detachment forms the basis for other experiences to occur. So, you first need to disengage before you can fully engage in something else, such as relaxing.
Indeed! But how does one achieve that? They suggest the old “make a ritual out of it” to flip the switch and bilge out the worries:
Sometimes it can be difficult to stop thinking about your work after working hours. If you notice that your mind is constantly filled with thoughts about your unfinished tasks or you keep going over work situations in your head, you could try to create a transition ritual that enables you to more easily switch from your work mindset to a leisure mindset. This simple action that you repeat daily – such as writing a to-do list for the next day, washing your coffee mug, or changing your clothes after arriving home – helps to signify the end of your working day and the start of your free time.
Also, the “schedule a time to think about it” trick:
Similarly, you may take care of an elderly family member and find it hard not to think about your loved one when you are at work. To prevent your thoughts from circling back to your care tasks or worries, you could purposefully schedule a ‘worry moment’ every day. So, whenever you notice that you start to worry, you postpone these thoughts to your ‘worry moment’. Research has demonstrated that this strategy significantly reduced people’s average daily worry time from 37 to 25 minutes, which might not sound like a lot but will soon add up to a lot less worrying.
When you’re collaborating with someone else (work, family, maybe even yourselves!) and can’t make a decisions, someone told me a tactic. To avoid analysis paralysis, you can also make a decision quickly and decide to revisit it in the future, like three or six months later. Or sooner if it makes sense. The trick here, I guess, is to give your mind permission to not worry and debate about it, and push it off until that “meeting” in the future.
IT department ROI spreadsheets need to use money made, not saved
From The Challenge of Cloud Compliance and Security - Guest: Hillery Hunter, GM and CTO at IBM Cloud
The problem with a lot of IT department metrics is that they don’t get to use revenue, profit, etc. generated and instead have to show that they were either the cheapest option or that savings paid for the investment:
this topic around ROI, and how do you get a larger organization to really understand the value? But the conclusion from that study that we published recently really is that you have to take a step up above the IT metrics and not burden the IT organization with, “The cost savings of going to cloud,” for example. But it’s where the metric is too narrow and placed only on the IT organization for the outcomes of a cloud migration, you miss the opportunity to be talking about end-to-end value creation, the time that it takes to go from concept for a new product to the time that that’s generating cash with customers. Let’s look at it that level. And then how does the cloud bring fundamental change to our processes and methodologies and such?
And at that level you’re having a business conversation around value creation, value generation, and you have metrics actually that are shared between the line of business and the IT folks. When you’re doing that, then everyone understands that the cloud migration and digital transformation is in service of a higher level objective and it’s not just trying to save money on the HR system or something else like that.
Relevant to your interests
Not All Leads are Created Equal - by Hinada - An overview of how to categorize your customers/prospects and metrics to help sales people prioritize their time. And, you know, more stuff along those lines.
Being a “sucker” probably isn’t that big of a deal - ‘Ask yourself, “What is the thing I’m afraid of? I’m afraid I’m going to feel like a fool in this situation.” And ask, “How big of a deal would that be? What would it mean to say, ‘I’ve played the fool in one situation’?” The more you ask yourself, the more okay with it you are, and the easier it is to see the values you’re trying to vindicate and be serious about those.’
You still need good software - “Companies with high interoperability grew revenue 6x faster than their peers with low interoperability and unlocked an additional five percentage points in annual revenue growth.”
Virality is a myth, mostly - Instead of spreading with WoM (many people telling many people), you need to (also) get famous people to promote your stuff.
Kodak strategy gone wrong - As always, the more about disrupted companies is over simplified.
Customer-Led Growth Is Getting More Attention Among B2B Firms: Should You Care? - “It’s more profitable to sell to an existing customer. Fred Reichheld demonstrated 20 years ago that selling to existing customers is more profitable and less costly –that a 5% increase in retention rates can increase profitability by 25%. Unfortunately, few software/tech companies learned this lesson back when Fred was teaching it, since the majority of marketing budgets and effort still go toward net-new acquisition.”
Logoff
We’re almost at 500 subscribers, which is, you know, pretty great! I moved around 360 people from my previous email newsletter manager when I moved to here, so I got a bit of a jump-start. I’ve built those up since about 2014. Anyhow, just two or three more and there’ll be 500 of you, which is great. I think that’ll let me set a goal of 1,000 by the end of this year. You should help me get there! Recommend this newsletter to friends or subscribe if you haven’t already.
Also: one of the weird things about substack is that it doesn’t have a mobile version of its newsletter writing app. This episode is done on Safari on my phone because of the whatever of being sick. Sorry if it’s weird.