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.

It is that time again: college visit season.

This spring my daughter, who is a junior, and I made it to five colleges for overnight campus visits.

A campus visit is no small thing. It involves time off school (and work for mom and dad), travel, and the expense of accommodations. You don’t do them on a whim. And you certainly don’t visit schools that your child is only mildly interested in.

By the time a prospective student visits the campus, that student is a “hot” prospect.

Schools foot a big bill to get them there—purchasing names for search mailings, sending admissions staff to college fairs, conducting email marketing and advertising campaigns, and designing glossy view books. Add to that the expense of the visit weekend itself – more mailings, tours, free meals and tee shirts and Nalgene bottles, and the herculean efforts of admissions staff, administrators, professors, and student ambassadors to make it all happen.

Why leave any element of the visit to chance?

Since my son was searching for his ideal college fit two years ago, I have been a proponent of overnight visits, thinking the best way to get a feel for a campus culture is to experience the campus. But not every school allows overnight visits.

Now I may know why.

Twice now my daughter has been picked up by her student host, brought back to the dorm, and told, “I have to go to the library to study for a big exam tomorrow. You can go and do the stuff they’ve got planned for prospects. Here’s my cell phone number – call me when you want to get back in the room.”

Huh?

You are leaving your hottest prospect to fend for herself for hours on end during a visit that could seal—or break—the deal?

At one school I learned that the student hosts aren’t compensated for their efforts, they aren’t trained, and they don’t even volunteer to be hosts. The admissions office sends them an email telling them they’ll be having a prospective student stay with them.

A prospective student is a potential paying customer – more than $120,000 for four years. A campus host is the closer.

Would you entrust the best leads in your sales pipeline to someone who isn’t ready, willing, and eager to engage in the sales process?

Would you allow your $120,000 prospect to feel lonely, bored, and annoyed during the most critical moments of the sales process?

By Bernice Mirrilees
Account Executive
CZ Marketing

There’s the joyous message that you plan to communicate.

And then there’s the message that your audience (or prospects) receive and internalize.

My parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary recently, and we five kids put together an open house that included a short program.

Of the kids, I’ve orbited the farthest from my home state of North Dakota, where we held the reception for my parents. I had not seen many of my parents’ friends for twenty years. I was devastated at how frail many appeared. I still remembered them when they were in midlife. Many arrived alone, their spouses long since buried.

“I almost didn’t come this afternoon,” one woman said. “It was 10 years ago yesterday that my husband died – we had been married 42 years.”

Another elderly woman, whose rigid face looked like she’d had a stroke, lost two teenage children years ago to two different tragedies within six months, one of whom was a classmate of mine. The woman’s husband was not able to make the 50th anniversary celebration because he was wheelchair bound, in the late stages of Parkinson’s. She also said, “I wanted to see you, but I almost didn’t come.” We talked a while about her beautiful daughter Suzanne, who died in an avoidable car accident in 1980.

When planning the celebration, we five kids never considered the emotion that my parents’ 50th would evoke in their friends.

That day, there was a sense of joy for my parents’ successful partnership (and that fact that the marriage survived the rebellious teenage angst of their oldest son).

But for some, the gathering marked a milestone they would never reach, because of divorce or death.

It’s true that there is no such thing as a brute fact (or brute event, for that matter). Every message that is sent by your organization is deconstructed in transit and then socially reconstructed through the filters of your prospects. It makes communicating your message the greatest (and most wonderful) challenge facing your organization.

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.

Some of the folks you really need to be listening to aren’t talking to you.

I once used a local dry cleaners for my shirts and did so for about 5 years. One day, while the owner waited on me, a young, pretty woman walked in. I was handing him my credit card to pay for my shirts when he turned and helped her. He made me wait. After 5 years of loyalty, I walked out and never returned. The dry cleaners was about a half mile out of my way, and that day he gave me a reason to leave. I never told him about how I felt. I never said good-bye. Poof! I was gone.

A friend recently was driving back from vacation on the East Coast and decided to drop in on a college that was on their son’s “maybe” list. The school made their list only because the daughter of a family friend attended the college and raved about it. A personal referral ranks high on my list as a high value prospect.

So the family popped by the campus and got the standard tour with a current student dressed in blue jeans with her hair pulled back. The family then headed back on the road. The school never contacted them. Never followed up with a phone call to the prospective student, asking, “How was your visit? What did you like? What questions do you still have?”

You wonder if the private liberal arts school had such an overabundance of smart male applicants that their lack of follow-up was a tactic to keep enrollment low.

Consequently, the school will never know why my friend’s son will not attend in Fall 2009. I’m not saying that he would have attended had the admissions folks cared what he and his parents thought. But my guess is that at the next marketing meeting, the enrollment team evaluated their plan and creative based on what they prefer or what some of the current students and faculty declare as acceptable. Most likely it reflected the cheery perspective of folks in love with their decision to attend or work at the school.

The next time you pat yourself on the back and say, “Look, these existing clients (current students, current members, etc) really like this or that,” remember this: The most important folks may not be in the room. Who will speak for them?

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?