Good evening everyone. It’s 2 days before Christmas and as is typical, work is a bit slow, Clients waiting on next year’s budgets, everyone is tied up with Xmas, shopping, family stuff. I usually take this time of year to go through my contact list, purge old emails, backup my files, update passwords, profiles, etc. You know, just general housekeeping stuff.
I was also thinking about the “Fosbury Flop”. (Below)
So while I’m going through my old contacts deciding who to keep and who to throw out, I called an old friend that I used to work with back in the day. He now owns his own successful company using his considerable skills to help his own clients generate and close new business. As usual, we eventually got around to discussing modern day sales and marketing, something we’re both passionate about.
We both agreed that while we have more communication channels than ever before that the noise is increasing at an exponential rate. It is getting harder and harder to reach our ideal customers.
The solution everyone seems to have come up with is to play the numbers game, to simply Increase the volume of their marketing efforts, to use more channels than ever before, to over-communicate in the hopes that 1 out of 10 messages actually gets through the noise.
Of course all of this has the unintended consequences of simply increasing the noise level by another order of magnitude. You see the problem.
It’s time to think differently. We simply cannot keep doing more of what is already not working. You can do it now or you can do it later but eventually you’ll come to the same conclusion. It is inevitable.
Enter the “Fosbury Flop”.
What is the Fosbury Flop ? Here’s a summary from Wikipedia..
Description- The Fosbury Flop is a style used in the athletics event of high jump. It was popularized and perfected by American athlete Dick Fosbury, whose gold medal in the 1968 Summer Olympics brought it to the world's attention. Over the next few years, the flop became the dominant style of the event and remains so today.
This was a entirely new athletic technique for high jumping. Everyone laughed at Dick when he first did it. Now everyone does it that way. Fosbury was not afraid to think differently.
I have always been a non-conformist so this idea really appeals to me. If the crowd goes left I go right simply because its the road less traveled and you never know what you may find down there. Sure others say “I’ve been down that road I know what’s there it’s not worth your time” but every once in a while a Fosbury comes along and changes everything.
So to my friends and acquaintances I encourage you to think about that. Are we simply going to keep doing what we’ve always done with diminishing returns? Or are we going to think and act differently even if it means taking a risk?
What say you? Am I the only one seeing this? Does anybody else have this figured out yet? I’ve got some ideas.
I’d love to start a discussion. (And no I’m not trying to sell you anything).