I have been a fly fisherman for 30-plus years. Even lived in Montana for a couple years and in Colorado for several more.

Yet, I’m still breathlessly average in every aspect of the craft.

As part of my mid-life journey, I’m currently reading Gary Borgor’s, Fishing the Film. I can do better than a C minus, right?

The film is the few molecules of skin that constitute the surface of the stream or body of water.

In general, trout feed on nymphs bouncing along the the bottom of the river. And on emerging insects a few inches below, in, or on the film:  the water’s surface.

Thus, the importance of the film for fly-fishers.

Insects start out as eggs at river’s bottom. As they mature,  they rise to the surface, eventually pushing their way through the film and becoming a full adult that sits on the surface and eventually flies away, if not eaten or crippled. To live for a few hours to mate. And then to die.

A short (unhappy?) life.

Predator’s advantage

Borgor says that the #1 job of a fly-fisher to think like a predator. In the animal kingdom, for example, lions become experts in their prey by watching their movements.

In contrast,  humans read, take a class, gape at a computer screen for a webinar. That’s helpful. But not nearly enough.

The most productive activity is to observe your prey. And thus the problem:  “Unfortunately, humans almost never want to spend time observing,” writes Borgor.

That requires patience. And a genuine interest in the subject.

What a prospect cares about

Borgor’s comment made me think of prospects. The application is not that prospects are prey. They are not. And if you think they are, you have bigger problems.

The takeaway is the importance of more deeply understanding the people who you want to join your cause or service. They don’t think like you. Nor are they thinking about how smart you are. Or that you “deliver results.” Or that your organization is “global.”

After years of meetings, proposals, and presentations, I have concluded that prospects are not thinking of me or my firm at all (at least not in the way I obsess about me!).

They think about themselves. Period.

And the more questions I ask, the more I am able to “observe” them.

A prospect recently paid me an off-handed compliment as we stood up to leave after lunch: “Normally I’m the one doing all the listening,”  he said. “Thanks for letting me talk today.”

Observing can lead to trust.

How do prospects come to trust a person, product, or firm?

Prospects make what appear to be snap judgments that are not based, necessarily, on the best rational choice for them. It’s more akin to the alchemy of love than to the step-by-step process of solving an algebraic problem. Crassly, it can be likened to how men in a crowded bar crank their heads when a beautiful woman sashays in. There’s a nanosecond of appraisal and then judgment: smokin’ hot!

The emotion is primitive, visceral, and, of course, in this instance, quite shallow—but the impression is often permanent.

Trust is not lust, of course. So the bar analogy may be more provocative than it is instructive. But whatever the science behind the emotion, trust is not purely rational, at least not initially. That is, chemistry precedes performance. Prospects must trust that you deliver results before they’ve experienced it. “The door to trust is opened emotionally and instinctually,” says Bruce Philp, coauthor of The Orange Code. “Only after that is it about performance.” No doubt you have to deliver on what you promise (back to reality), but not initially.

That’s why to prospects, the language of chest-thump-ese is gibberish.

Every American Indian tribe (and every Texan and Mexican) feared the Comanches in the 1800s.

Their rise to dominance is in part a story of positioning strategy. I’m just finishing Sam Gwynne’s recent book, Empire of the Summer Moon – a riveting narrative on the rise and fall of one of the most feared tribes in American history. Only the Sioux on the northern plains come close to the Comanches’ ferocity.

The Comanches’ ascent can be traced clearly to their expertise in raising, breaking, and riding horses. Over the course of about 200 years, the tribe developed a specialty in handling horses. Consequently, the Comanches made their living by hunting buffalo and warring against other tribes (stealing their horses) and, eventually, killing the white man. The tribe had no patience for subsistence farming.

At a young age, Comanche boys had a horse to ride. By the time they were in their teens, a young brave could sweep up off the ground a wounded comrade at full gallop. For years, the Comanches raided and slaughtered the frontier settlers, including the Army and even the early Texas Rangers. For example, when chasing and then engaging the Comanches after a raid on a settlement, pursing soldiers would dismount their plodding Army horses to shoot their muskets. It took a minute or so to reload the rifle.

But the Comanches would stay on their mustangs, which were much leaner and faster than the those of the soldiers, and charge into a line of standing soldiers. By the time it took to reload a musket, a Comanche brave could shoot a dozen or more arrows while hanging on to the side of a horse at breakneck speed.

Eventually, the inexorable advance of the white man pushed out the Comanches. The white man slowly learned to ride more like a Comanche warrior – on a fast horse. And then came the game-changer: the Walker Colt, the repeating revolver. Then it was the white man’s turn to slaughter the Indians.

The simple point is that power comes from being really good at something. Ergo, one thing. Consequently, you develop a reputation (and a messaging strategy) for that one thing.

The specialist position is really the only tenable marketing strategy in today’s explosion of organizations, services, and products.

Several weeks back my family and I attended a Chicago Cubs baseball game.

Yes, they lost. In the 12th inning.

As we walked out of Wrigley, a middle-aged homeless-looking guy stood in the middle of the sidewalk with a cardboard sign: “Why Lie? I need money for cold beer.”

Gutsy, I thought. But I didn’t reach for my spare change.

Three other stories of need: The other day as I was exiting Starbucks, an apparently homeless man asked me for a Passion Ice Tea Lemonade with sweetener. He was specific, if not tactful.

A couple weeks ago, as I was driving from Boulder, CO, to Denver, a man with a deeply tanned face textured like that of a lizard skin, stood at the exit off 36 and held up a cardboard sign saying he was out of work. I averted my eyes as my car slowed at the top of the exit ramp.

As he walked past my car, he pulled out a purple mobile flip phone out of his back pack and took a call.

Last week, while leaving a downtown Chicago restaurant at around 10 PM, I turned down Clark and stopped at a light. A woman who appeared to be in her mid-twenties emerged out of the darkness, ran up to the front passenger window of my car, and screamed at me, “I’ve got a baby in car and I’ve just run out of gas. You have to help me now.”

It’s all messaging, subtle and not so.

An article in The New York Times recently provided some statistics on the state of blogs on the Internet. The stats originate from Technorati, an Internet search engine that tracks blogs:

•There are roughly 133 million blogs;
•Only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs had been updated in the past 120 days; and
• Between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs generate most of the page views.

Millions and millions of poppies: Which poppy is prettier?

The stats on blogs confirm how cluttered the marketing landscape has become. The herculean challenge is to position your organization accurately and to communicate your message to your prospects with clarity and power.

I say, “Good riddance to the blog fever,” if in fact fewer folks are paying attention to their blogs. Most were lousy writers. Maybe the slow death (or at least slower growth) of blogs will free up some attention for those organizations whose message is worth hearing.

Marketing strategy is really competitor strategy.

Tim Barg, our vice president of strategy, and I sat down and rattled off a couple principles we’ve learned over the years:

1. Competitor strategy is counter-intuitive. Your intuition says, “We need to parrot what the leader in our industry is saying, because it’s working for them.” Jack Trout, co-author of Positioning, once said to me, “You always avoid the strengths of the leader.”

I would say that most leaders of organizations do the opposite: they parrot the leader.

2. Instead of messaging specifically, most organizations message generally. They say the same thing as every other organization in their industry.

There seems to be a “fear of the niche.” There seems to be a built-in resistance to focus narrowly on a message. Or becoming good at one thing. They fear being different.

All educational institutions, for example, say they specialize in high academics – which, unless you’re Harvard or Stanford, means essentially nothing. All management consulting firms say they deliver results. All business intelligence software firms say their software deliver better analytics.

All this is confusing to prospective clients or students or donors. If you’re general with your message, you have no hook.

So if you’re having a hard time growing, begin with your competitors. What are they doing? What are they leading with in terms of their messaging? And how are you different?

My next blog topic: “The Myth of the Silver Bullet.”

“Just because everyone is doing it doesn’t mean it’s right. If everyone were jumping over a cliff, would you do that too?”

Those two lines are a blast from my past. I recall my parents chiding me when I got in trouble hurling snowballs at the school bus. Once the school bus driver slammed on his brakes, threw open the doors, and challenged his kids to catch me. I escaped only because a fellow snowballer stepped between me and a couple kids from the bus. His name was Dean, and he was a big friend.

In marketing, it’s pretty certain that if everyone is doing it, and you’re doing it too, then your clients are ignoring you. It’s all white noise. A good example of this is holiday greeting cards.

Just because everyone is sending you generic Christmas cards with signatures of staff members you’ve never met doesn’t mean you should do the same.

Here’s my recommendation: Ignore your clients at Christmas, if the best you can do is a generic Christmas card. If you don’t talk to them much throughout the year, then feel free to ignore them during the holidays. The card won’t bring a smile. It won’t elicit a “Wow, I should really do more business with them – that was a personal, meaningful card!”

If you think it is competitive in the world in which you market your organization, consider the problems of a book author:

In 2006, there were 291,920 new books and editions published in the U.S.

That’s right: almost 300,000 competitors. You are writing a book into a world awash in books and web sites and blogs (71 million) and Paris Hilton.

So the problem isn’t, really, getting your book published, though for first-time authors that’s a big deal. Your book is born into a world of 300,000 other babies, all screaming for attention.

Worse, book publishers are what I call “importers of printed materials.” That is, their primary value in the economic food chain is that they will publish your book using the lowest-cost paper available. That’s great for them, but doesn’t do much to sell your book.

So, if you think that landing a book contract is a coup, think again. Publishers are as clueless as authors are about publicity. After a few weeks, your publicist from the publisher won’t remember your name; publicity is a “present-tense” business – your 60 seconds of attention from the publisher is around 6 weeks. Suddenly, your book is considered “backlist.” That means you’ll receive no more attention from your publisher to publicize your book.

The higher economic activity is publicity, not writing. I know that’s depressing to writers, who all think that good writing will, ultimately, sell millions. I think it was Stevie Ray Vaughan, the late blues guitarist, who once said that the best guitarists are probably still playing to a Texas bar of around 30 people.

Just because you’re good doesn’t mean you will sell millions. Or grow your organization.

Stuck at a plateau? Wish your organization could “go to the next level,” whatever that means. Simply want something more than single digit growth?

Remember this phrase: the POWER of 7.

Marketing can do only so much for professional service firms. Yes, you need to understand your clear point of difference in the marketplace.

Yes, you need to be able to communicate that with clarity to those in your database (current clients, past clients, referral sources, business to business partners, etc.); you need to be able to educate folks on how you’re different from your competitors. Yes, you need a web site and brochures and the like. You need basic marketing.

But most professional service firms grow primarily by referral. Period.

Other than a public endorsement from Oprah, you grow primarily, for example, when an executive at a current client refers you to a friend of hers at another firm. That’s the magic.

It’s a form of “word of mouth” marketing. And a cousin to viral marketing. The problem is that “word of mouth” tends to be passive, not active. You get the referral at the whim of your current client.

Back to the POWER of 7 …
If you want to grow, your consultants (lawyers, investment bankers, etc) simply need to pick up the telephone. Here’s the statistic: If you follow up a direct mail piece (letter or newsletter or other publication, for example) with a phone call, it is seven times more likely to be effective in generating a referral. (The statistic comes from the real estate services industry—Brian Buffini, www.buffiniandcompany.com).

A phone call is active. Instead of expecting the phone to ring, you make it ring. Check in with your clients and referral sources. Ask a few questions. Set up a lunch. Perhaps even create a friendship.

Radical, I know.

The problem, of course, is the notion of using the telephone for business. Who wants to do that?

Too bad we can’t outsource that to India.

I suspect that one of the most overused movie illustrations comes from City Slickers, the 1991 movie starring Billy Crystal and, among others, Jack Palance.

Remember that movie?

It’s the one in which Curly Washburn (played by Palance), the flea-bitten cowboy, raises his index finger and croaks about the “one thing” that the three “city slicker” characters must discover to find life’s meaning.

Marketing strategy folks often preach the gospel of the “one thing” or “your point of difference” (a phrase I borrowed from marketing genius Harry Beckwith) for organizations, as they attempt to grow in today’s highly competitive climate: You need to be known for one thing, especially if you’re not the leader in your space.

Knowing your “one thing” gives you focus for your marketing communications and serves to position you in the minds of your prospects. It gives them a mental hook.

The problem is that the “one thing” is not one dimensional. Often it’s not merely one thing; it’s a matrix of things that creates the focus.

For example, universities often try to distill their point of difference to one strength: Value; or Academic Rigor; or, Class Size.

But you never own only one strength; it’s often a combination of strengths that make up the One. To make it even more complex, that combination of strengths has meaning only as it relates to your competitors. Your context or environment shapes your point of difference.

We recently assisted a university with their messaging strategy. The university has a combination of strengths: affordability, academics (in relation to its competitors), and size of enrollment. All three formed the foundation of the school’s unique position in their competitive space. There were other layers to the school’s messaging strategy, such as location, but the three dimensions gave the school’s marketing program focus and power.

So, what are the different dimensions to your point of difference?
And how do your competitors’ positions shape yours?