Chapter 19: Faring Well in the New Age of IT Distribution

And so, dear readers and friends, we’ve reached the end of this particular journey together. Looking back, it’s immediately apparent that something tricky happened somewhere along the way. Step by step, little by little, we experienced a major paradigm shift, and we’ll never been the same.

It was a shift away from the notion that we’re in the IT distribution business – and toward the notion that we’re in the problem-solving business. From becoming an entangled consultant to using our brains to the Bass-O-Matic to asking questions and on back through resources, expertise, services and specialization, everything we focused on was about solving real business problems – for ourselves, for our upstream partners and for our customers.

This insight led us to the epiphany that all business problems can be boiled down to three words: better, faster, cheaper. We knew we’d have to get really good at helping our customers do business with higher quality (better), in less time (faster) and for lower cost (cheaper) if we wanted to survive the journey.

In order to lead our customers to the promised land of better-faster-cheaper, we knew we’d have to get smart and distinguish ourselves from the competition, and we knew we had to get comfortable with usingdata to diagnose and solve problems. Here, we were assisted by an able guide, Vilfredo Pareto, who showed us a simple way to zero in on the true causes of problems – and also helped me keep my shoes tied and get to work on time. What a guy!

Ultimately, however, we knew that data alone wouldn’t ensure our success. After all, in the end, work gets done by humans. Without humans, there is no RESS. They are our resources, and in them lies the expertise that helps us deliver services and specialize. To get the most out of those humans, we decided that we’d commit to communicating with them one-on-one – regularly, frequently and openly.

And here we are, at the end of it all, seeing the world of IT distribution – the world of business, in fact – through a very different lens. It’s a big change, and at this point, some of it is purely intellectual. It will take discipline, practice and patience to make it part of our lives. But we know it will pay off.

Change is not easy. When the landscape shifts – even when we’re the ones creating the change – it pushes buttons in our primitive brains that scare us, even when we know it’s going to be good for us.

And that’s why – as we leave this particular journey behind us – we’re looking forward to starting a new one soon. This one will be all about change – conceiving it, getting support for it and leading it. Borrowing ideas from one of the most successful companies in the world, we’ll explore some different ways to think about and DO change.

And there will probably be more fishing!

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 18: From Yoda to You: A Look Back

Look at you! You must be exhausted! After all, you’ve come all this way on this long, exciting journey. Want some water? How about a sandwich? Catch your breath. Don’t worry. I’ll do all the talking.

This whole adventure has been about adding value – for your customers and for your strategic partners, like Avnet. It’s been about winning customers, not just deals – and keeping them.

In a way, it seems like just yesterday that we were in the Dagobah swamp with Yoda, promising to DO, not just try. And what, exactly, will we do? Well, we’ll do what it takes to stand out from the pack of box movers, to put “value added” back in front of “reseller,” to entangle ourselves with our customers – in a platonic way, of course.

Once we left Dagobah, we found ourselves in the mountains, gazing on the RESS peaks: Resources, Expertise, Services and Specialization. In the shadows of those verdant hills, we maximized the application of our resources, leveraged our expertise, sharpened up our service offerings and contemplated the virtues of specialization.

But we didn’t RESS long. To find our way out of those mountains, we had to use algebra. The timeless and invaluable equation – “Q x A = E” – was our salvation. Once we understood that our customers’ acceptance of a solution was just as important as the solution’s bells and whistles, we knew we had to start asking questions to truly understand our customers’ toughest business problems. When we weren’t sure whatquestions to ask, we went fishing.

We got so good at asking questions, that we had to use the Bass-O-Matic ’76 to help us prioritize our customers’ problems and decide which ones we would NOT try to fix.

At that point, we realized that our brains were the powerful products in our inventory, and that we could use the skills of asking questions and prioritizing to become consultants and trusted advisors to our customers. We knew that the dreaded “C” word was the key to selling beyond the sale and adding value that would entangle our business with our customers’ for mutual benefit.

Oh. I see you’re still tired from this amazing junket. I’ll pause for now and let you get some RESS – er, REST. Next week, we’ll continue our look back and start planning our next grand adventure. Until them, an Epsom salt bath is just what those sore feet require.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 17: The Single Most Effective Management Tool

OK, even I admit that that headline smacks of hyperbole. After all, with all the management books out there, how could we possibly agree on a single tool that is critical to effective management?

Some folks might think it’s clear roles and responsibilities, and those are really important. Others might think it’s well-documented processes and procedures. Those are valuable too. Still others might think it’s SMART goals or a compelling mission statement.

I’ll be honest. All of those things are pretty darned important. But in my opinion and experience, nothing gets results like effective working relationships. And nothing creates effective relationships – working or otherwise – like frequent, meaningful communication between two humans.

That’s why I’m an absolute evangelist for one-on-ones. There’s nothing more powerful than a manager and her direct report sitting down for 30 minutes every week to chat about whatever’s on the direct’s mind.

With well-run one-on-ones, insights surface, obstacles are removed and fires are prevented. More importantly, however, effective working relationships are formed – relationships that allow organizations to sell more, add more value and just plain get things done.

The first objection I usually encounter to this is, “But I already have one-on-ones.” If that’s true, I’m sorry to have wasted your time. However, in most cases, I find what people think are one-on-ones are really status updates, two-person staff meetings or interrogations. One of the keys to effective one-on-ones is that your direct report should determine the agenda. You might kick off the meeting with an open-ended question, but let the direct take it from there. That doesn’t mean you can’t use the time to give your direct feedback or coach her in a development area, but the primary driver of the conversation is your direct report, not you.

The second objection is usually, “But I don’t have that kind of time.” I’m not entirely unsympathetic on that one. We’re all busy – too busy – and fitting in a bunch of 30-minute one-on-ones every week seems nearly impossible. Trust me, it can be done. Even if you have 10 direct reports, that’s only five hours every week – 13% of a standard work week (and probably even less of yours).

Not only is 13% of your time very little to spend on direct management, it will also pay dividends before you know it and actually save you time.

How much productivity do you lose when you and your directs aren’t on the same page?

How much time do you lose every week to urgent interruptions from your direct reports, asking for help navigating a political minefield, removing a roadblock or putting out a fire?

I can guarantee that – after just a few weekly, 30-minute one-on-ones – those interruptions and that lost productivity will decrease dramatically. Once you’ve opened the door to frequent, meaningful communication, your directs will be much more likely to be on the same page with you and much less likely to feel that every obstacle requires your immediate intervention.

I could go on and on about one-on-ones – why to do them, how to do them, when to do them, where to do them – but I won’t. I’ll simply ask you to give some thought to whether you’re having effective one-on-ones and, if not, if you’re willing to gamble 30 minutes a week to dramatically improve productivity.

Also, if you’re interested in more details on one-on-ones, I strongly encourage you to check outhttp://www.manager-tools.com. Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne host a podcast there that aligns very closely to my own advice on effective management, and they have some particularly powerful guidance on one-one-ones that just might change your life.

How’s that for hyperbole?

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 16: Don't Forget the People

The Human Side of Selling and Keeping More

Phew! If you got through that tome-like article on Pareto charts, you’re to be commended. I thank you for sticking with it and hope you were able to extract some value from my musings on Italian economists and the perils of Hollandaise sauce. And I’d like to ask your indulgence once more as we completely shift gears. I promise to keep this one brief.

Throughout this series of articles, we have focused on simple things that will make you stand out from the competition, adding more value for your partners and for your customers. Up to now, the strategies and tactics we’ve discussed have focused on operational excellence, continuous improvement and data-driven decision making.

Approaching technology sales and distribution with these handy tools and techniques will certainly distinguish you from Joe Boxmover who adds no value, but that’s only half the story. Managing a business is, fundamentally, about managing people. After all, barring super robots and artificial intelligence, no work gets done without people.

Whether you’re the CEO of a large corporation, a middle manager, an entrepreneur or even a sole proprietor with a teenaged niece you’re grooming for the business, how you manage people will impact your results. I, for one, would like to see you be the most effective manager possible – for your business’s sake, for your employees’ sake and for your sake. The next several articles will focus on just that.

I know there’s no shortage of management philosophy and advice out there. You could easily spend your commission check every month on the latest management books and have nothing to show for it. That’s why these articles will focus on specific actions and behaviors that you can implement – with little or no investment – to increase your effectiveness as a manager of people.

I promised to be brief this time around, so I’ll simply give you a sneak preview of the next installment. We’ll talk about the single most important thing you can do as a manager to get better results from your employees. You won’t want to miss it. Until then, hang on to your commission check.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 15: The Old 80-20 Rule or Making Pareto Practical

Add Value and Sell More with a Simple Data Analysis Tool

Last time we talked – instead of my usual practical advice – I gave you a history lesson, some theory and not one bit of homework. By the end of this week’s column, I hope you’ll see that the groundwork of history and theory was necessary to get us here. Strap yourself in – this is going to get hairy and fun.

If you haven’t read my last column about Vilfredo Pareto and his powerful contribution to solving business problems, I strongly encourage you to do so before reading on to find out how to actually apply Pareto’s concepts by making a Pareto chart. For now, I’ll completely oversimplify Pareto’s vast accomplishments in economics with the Pareto principle: 80 percent of problems are caused by only 20 percent of causes.

If you remember our previous conversations about selling stuff, we agreed that it all comes down to asking questions and listening actively to figure out what your customer’s biggest problem is and then solving it.

Let’s say, for example, that your customer is Wikimedia, the company responsible for the hugely popular Wikipedia. The company got a lot of unwelcome attention earlier this year when its data center in Amsterdam overheated, effectively shutting the website down for European users. Your job, then, would be to figure out why the data center overheats, and a Pareto chart could help you.

But since not everyone can relate to overheated data centers, let’s focus on something we can all understand.

Over the past two years, let’s say I’ve been late to work 143 times [Note to my boss: This hypothetical scenario is for learning purposes only and should not be included in my annual review]. Fortunately, I’ve had the immense foresight and perspicacity to keep track of my lateness and the reasons for it. My tally sheet looks something like this:



As you can see, I’ve sorted my tally of reasons for lateness in descending order by frequency. This is a crucial step in creating a Pareto chart in a simple office tool like Microsoft Excel. I’ve also added a column that figures out each reason’s contribution to the total, e.g. not hearing my alarm accounts for 22% of the 143 times I was late to work.

I’ve also added another column to track the cumulative contribution. This will be very important as we apply the Pareto principle to solving this problem.

As you can see, there are 10 separate reasons why I was late to work those 143 times. However, only three to four of them account for 80% of the times I was late. This might be made clearer with another picture. Here’s that same data, represented in graphic form:



Like Facebook junkies, server logs freely spit out endless amounts of data about themselves that will help you get to the bottom of this, so you won’t be fumbling around in the dark on this one. If the data center overheated 40 times in the past five years, you’ll probably find 10 different causes for the overheating, but only two of those causes were behind 80 percent of those situations. This is the Pareto principle in action.

Once you’ve figured out, hypothetically, that unnecessary read cycles on a tape drive and faulty power management on a web server have caused 32 of the 40 overheating incidents – allowing you to ignore things like that one really hot day in Amsterdam or the time a trash can caught on fire [Please note: I am totally making these things up. I have no reason to believe there’s anything wrong with Wikimedia’s tape drives or trash cans.] – you can start focusing the conversation on solutions that will truly make a difference for the customer.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to go out and start gathering some data about a problem that you or your customer is currently facing, and plug that data into a Pareto chart. Maybe it’s the number of RMAs you’re getting or the number of deals you’re losing to the competition. No matter what it is, you can easily start zeroing in on the key drivers by tallying up the causes and listening to Vilfredo Pareto.

By the way, if you’d like assistance creating a simple Pareto chart in Excel like the one shown above, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’m always happy to help. You can find me at SuddenSixSigma@gmail.com.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 14: This Won't Hurt a Bit

Getting Comfortable with Data Adds Value and Revenue

It’s funny. As long as we’re talking about storage arrays, we have no trouble talking data. People in our line of work deal with data all the time – gigabytes and petabytes and whatnot – and it doesn’t scare us a bit (warning: that won’t be the last pun in this column – spot them all and win – well – a satisfying chuckle, at best).

But ask us to provide a statistical basis for our sales forecasts, and we just might regress to the tantrums of childhood. The data that we sell is just fine, but the data about that data scares the hell out of most of us.

But the really funny thing is: that kind of data could actually help us sell a whole lot more of the other kind. It’s one thing to guess – or hypothesize, as the statisticians say – about our customers’ business problems, but in the real world, sometimes we only have part of the picture without data. And sometimes, we have to have hard, cold numbers to convince our customers and ourselves that we’re on the right track.

Imagine the power you could have – and the value you could add – if you could show your customers a pretty picture, based on data, that proved that buying just one piece of equipment from you could solve 80% of their biggest problems. Yeah, that’s pretty cool, isn’t it? And by “cool,” we mean nerdy, but profitable as all get out!

We don’t have to become statisticians, but if we can get comfortable with a couple of simple data analysis techniques, we can wow customers, add value to our partners and leave the competition in our eraser dust.

One of the simplest and most powerful data analysis tools you can learn to use is the Pareto chart. This clever variation on a basic column chart was named for Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist and philosopher who is probably best known for the Pareto principle. Before we get to the chart, it helps to understand the principle.

While studying land ownership and the distribution of wealth in his native country during the early 20th century, Signore Pareto discovered that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by only 20% of the people. Since then, economists, statisticians and quality control experts have found this phenomenon to be true in all kinds of contexts.

In sales, you might see the Pareto principle at work when you see that 20% of your customers account for 80% of your revenue. In quality control and business process improvement – which is the business you’re in, if you really want to sell more by helping your customers solve problems – you might see it when 80% of the things that go wrong are the result of about 20% of the possible causes. 80% of the time that the data center overheats, it’s caused by only a couple of the dozen or so possible issues.

As always, talking about data like this makes it sound way more complicated than it is. It’s like dancing about architecture. So next time, we’ll get into specifics, with real data, real numbers and real pretty pictures. We’ll use a Pareto chart to help figure out why I just can’t seem to get to work on time. Until then, I’m not going to give you any homework. I just want you to promise that you’ll be brave. The data won’t hurt you. Its bark is worse than its byte.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 13: Better, Faster and Cheaper: the Business Problem Trinity

If you’ve been following this series of articles, I hope you’ve noticed a theme by now. One way or another, each article has centered on the idea that what you’re selling – even the hottest technology and the sharpest services – matters much less than your customers’ and prospects’ business problems. Those business problems should drive every single discussion you have.

We’ve also talked about a number of tools, techniques, philosophies and mindsets that will help you figure out what your customers’ most pressing business problems are so that you can design the best solution.

But the truth is, it really isn’t all that hard. While a fishbone diagram and a prioritization method and thinking like a consultant are all critical to truly adding value in the continually evolving world of information technology, there are really only three business problems.

That’s right. Three.

No matter what your customers and prospects tell you, odds are that they’re trying to do one or more of three things: improve quality, increase speed and decrease cost.

In other words, they all want to do business better, faster and cheaper. Don’t we all?

And yet, we all want to complicate the conversation. We want to talk about data transfer rates and protocols, megabits and gigabytes. We want to pepper the conversation with six-digit numbers and three-letter acronyms.

Don’t misunderstand me. If you’re not on your game to explain the latest cutting-edge technology, you’ll be the first one eliminated from the dance-a-thon. But if you can’t tell a prospect how that technology is going to help them do things better, faster and/or cheaper, you won’t even get into the dance.

The in-depth, jargon-laden speeds-and-feeds conversations that so many of us techies relish rarely close a sale. In fact, we’re more likely to lose a sale by overwhelming the customer with information that is not only esoteric, but also frequently irrelevant. Our job – your job – is to translate those tech specs into a compelling story about reducing defects, speeding things up and fattening the bottom line. It’s to turn a jumble of product features into tools that run better, faster and cheaper businesses.

Fortunately, you’re not alone in this challenging mission. If you’re reading this, you probably already know that Avnet has a wealth of information, resources and collateral to support that translation process. If you’re blinded by the flashing lights and deafened by the bells and whistles of the latest gear, and can’t boil it down to a simple better/faster/cheaper conversation, pick up the phone and get help. If you don’t, you could be dancing alone.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 12: Make Money with the "C" Word

Think Like a Consultant to Sell Beyond the Sale

A few columns ago, we talked about the power of questions to keep a sales conversation focused on customer problems and needs. We even came to a tacit agreement (didn’t we?) that an effective sale can’t happen without asking questions – that questions allow us to gather information, diagnose a prospect’s biggest business problems and craft a cure for them.

All of that sounds innocent enough, but if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that approach to sales is a step down the path of consultancy – not just consultative selling, but truly consulting with your customers, far beyond what’s necessary to sell some servers or software.

Peter Drucker once wrote that the greatest strength of a consultant is to be ignorant and ask questions, and that’s just what I’ve been advocating all this time. I’ve been leading you down the path of becoming that dreaded “c” word to your customers and prospective customers. But why?

If you’ve been in the IT game long enough, you’ll probably guess that this is about margins. After all, consulting is really just another word for professional services, right? And everybody knows professional services have those killer margins.

That’s all true, but it’s not the point. You see, nearly anyone can sell the products and services you’re selling. And nearly anyone can compete with you on price.

But does anyone else out there have your brains? If so, you might want to give George Romero a call. But if not, you’ve just stumbled upon the most powerful product you can sell – your unique ideas, perspectives and experience. In short, your brains.

If you can take ideas like the ones presented in this series of articles or from any source of your choice, make them your own and then fit them into solving your customers’ toughest problems, you’re well on your way to that Holy Grail of sales – customer entanglement. And there’s no more powerful way to add value for all your partners.

When you act as a consultant – that is, offering your unique perspective, experience, skills and knowledge to your customers to help them do things better, faster and cheaper – you’ll not only have repeat buyers, but you’ll have customers who don’t WANT to do business without you. They’ll want you at their sides for every decision – from long-term strategy to short-term tactics.

And when their business decisions – informed by your wise advice and enlightened self-interest – lead to IT purchases, who do you think they’ll want to buy from? It won’t be a conversation about price. It won’t be a conversation about speeds and feeds. It might not even be a conversation at all. It’ll be an automatic sale, a natural outcome of a mutually trusting, beneficial and entangled relationship.

And you’ll have the “c” word to thank.

Give some thought to how you can take consulting to the next level with your customers and prospective customers. Are you taking every opportunity to add value with the power of your brains? Are you doing everything you can to help your partners, both upstream and downstream? Are you creating entangled business relationships that last beyond a transaction? If the answer to any of those questions is no, take some time to figure out what’s holding you back and how you can remove those obstacles.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 11: Consultative Sales Is Not Enough

Capture and Keep Customers with the Most Powerful Product in Your Inventory

“Money without brains is always dangerous.”

So said Napoleon Hill, best-selling author of the modern personal development classic, Think and Grow Rich. And it’s as true today as it was in his day.

It’s also true that money without brains is always limited – especially when it comes to selling technology. Sure, you can sell a lot of products and a lot of professional services. And you can probably make a lot of money in the process. But at some point, the flow of new customers through your pipeline will slow, and you’ll reach a saturation point with your existing customers. And the money will be spent.

But if you use your brains, the picture can be very different. I’m not talking about the power of positive thinking or The Secret or airy notions of believing, conceiving and achieving (though those are powerful too). I’m talking about actually using your brains to grow your business.

If you’ve read the other articles in this series, you’ve probably noticed that I’m really into concrete ideas, techniques and tools that will make you stand out from the hordes of iron movers who crowd the seven infernal circles of IT distribution. But these aren’t just tricks and window dressing. These are the tools of a consultant–-and they just might keep your money from getting dangerous or limited, or dangerously limited.

Wait. Did I just use the “c” word – that filthy, vapid synonym for all things unsavory, unvaluable and unhelpful? Didn’t Ed Finkelstein, legendary Macy’s CEO, say, “A consultant is someone who takes your watch away to tell you what time it is?”

Yes. To all of that. I did, and he did. And next time we meet, I’ll defend my use of that term, and tell you how reclaiming and redefining it can be the secret to a long, happy – and maybe even money-filled–-life.

Until then, as Casey Kasem always says, keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 10: Be Your Customer's Hero by NOT Solving Problems

Putting yourself in the mindset of truly solving customer problems – rather than selling so-called solutions – can be overwhelming at first. Just look at that fishbone diagram you made a couple weeks ago. If you did your level best to brainstorm every possible cause of the business problem you wanted to tackle, you probably ended up with a shockingly long laundry list of potential causes.

As I mentioned last time, what you absolutely DON’T want to do is start pointing to product features that address each and every item on the list. In fact, sometimes the best thing you can do for your customer is NOT solve every problem.

Instead, you need to stick that fish in the Bass-O-Matic ’76, puree it up and gulp down that tasty concoction.

OK, maybe that’s a bad metaphor. And nauseating, to boot.

The point is, you need to prioritize all those potential causes and find the key few that have maximum impact on the problem. Only then can you start offering solutions.

In the Six Sigma world, there are a number of Bass-O-Matics used to help blend up your bass into something you can start working on – from the so-called House of Quality (part of Quality Function Deployment, or QFD) to the Failure Modes Effects Analysis (FMEA) and the Pugh matrix.

But you don’t need complicated tools or acronyms to solve problems for your customers. You need simple tools that give you quick answers that add value.

Let’s take the problem of shoes coming untied. Now, I might have a few key requirements about my shoelaces. I might want them to stay tied, to match my shoes and to be tied in a very neat bow, for example. And I’d probably rank the importance of my needs in that order. Staying tied is most important, followed by matching my shoes, which is then followed by the very neat bow.

In order for my prioritization to work, I need to assign each of these a numeric value that corresponds to its importance, so I’ll give staying tied a 9, matching my shoes a 5 and the neat bow a 1.

Next, I need to pull out my fishbone and look at all the possible causes for my shoes not staying tied, from the length of the laces to the length of my fingernails. We’ll just pick three for simplicity: length of laces, material the laces are made from and the length of my nails.

Now comes the Bass-O-Matic moment. I need to plug all of these into a matrix and determine the impact that each potential cause has on my key requirements. The length of my laces, for example, probably has a high impact (call it a 9) on them staying tied, a low impact (or a 1) on matching my shoes and a medium impact (5) on the tidy bow.

I repeat this process with all the meat on my fishbone until I have a completed matrix that looks something like the one in this file.

Now, you probably wouldn’t agonize as much over keeping your shoes tied as I do. But this oversimplified example should give you an idea of how a prioritization matrix might help you zero in on problems worth solving (in this case, shoe lace length). More importantly, the matrix tells you what problems aren’t worth solving.

When you can tell your customers that some of their problems just aren’t worth solving, and start solving their most important problems, the whole conversation starts to change. Barriers come down. Trust builds up. Rather than being there to shove as many products into the data center as possible, you’re now there to help. You become a trusted advisor – even a hero.

Next time we meet, we’ll talk about using tools like the matrix above, the fishbone diagram, powerful questions and more to create powerful, entangled customer relationships that add value and profitability for everyone.

Until then, try taking the matrix for a spin. Pull all the meat off your fishbone diagram and see if you can use the matrix to help you churn out a tastier bass.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 9: Super Bass-O-Matic '76 Zeros in on Problems

Zeroing in on Business Problems with the Super Bass-O-Matic ’76

I’m a sucker for the classic Saturday Night Live sketches from the original cast. With clever creative assistance from Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol, the so-called "Not Ready for Prime Time Players" – John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris and Gilda Radner – created a sketch comedy template that hasn’t been matched in any other season of the show, in my not-so-humble opinion.

One of my favorites from that era is Dan Aykroyd’s surprisingly brief commercial spoof for the Super Bass-O-Matic ’76. I could describe it in lurid detail, but instead, let’s just take a look at it. Go ahead. It’ll only take a minute and a half. Tell your boss I said it was OK.

Click for Bass-O-Matic link.

Now, if you have any sense at all, you’re probably wondering what the heck that has to do with solving business problems, adding value for customers and partners, and selling more. And I don’t blame you. Bear with me.

If you remember our last conversation, we talked about using a fishbone diagram to brainstorm the causes of your customers’ (or your own) business problems. And if you did your homework, you probably realized pretty quickly that it can be a bit overwhelming. Even when you’ve already grouped the causes into categories – like Materials, Methods, Machinery/Equipment and People – the meat on your fishbone diagram points in dozens of different directions. It doesn’t tell you where to start solving.

At this point, there are two things you could do. First, you could try to chew up all that fish meat – to address every possible cause. In the ever-evolving world of information technology, you could probably find a product or service that would touch every single one. In fact, it’s tempting, isn’t it? Don’t we just love to solve every single problem our customers bring us?

Unfortunately, that approach just won’t work. For one thing, it’s going to be prohibitively expensive for your customer to buy all those, um, solutions, and logistically tricky for you to deliver them.

More importantly, not all causes are created equal. For example, if you look back at the problem of my shoes always coming untied, the fact that my laces are too short (materials) might have a greater impact than the fact that my fingernails are too long (machinery/equipment). I could go get a manicure for 30 bucks and not get the awesome results I’d get for two dollars’ worth of new shoelaces.

In other words, you have to prioritize. If you walk into a sales meeting with the idea that you’re going to solve every possible cause of your customer’s biggest problem, they’re probably going to laugh you right out of the boardroom. If, on the other hand, you can help your customer (or prospective customer) identify and solve the root causes of real business problems, you’ll be the hero. You’ll become a trusted advisor and valued partner. Your problem-solving process has to include finding the greatest leverage points – the places where the right solution, skillfully applied, will get the best results.

That’s why we all need the Super Bass-O-Matic ’76.

But that will have to wait until next time. I don’t mean to tease you, but I’ve already talked your eyes off plenty for this time around. Next time we meet, I promise to reveal the Bass-O-Matic.

In the meantime, pull out that fishbone diagram you made after reading the last installment and give some thought to what you might do with all that fish meat. If your first instinct is to start mapping every potential cause to a feature of something you sell, you’re in trouble. If, on the other hand, you’re wondering how you might identify the points of greatest leverage, then you’ll want to tune right back in next time. You’re about to be a hero.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant