Making Yourself Redundant

Can you imagine your company having a chief electricity officer? Seems ridiculous doesn’t it, but many large businesses did when electricity first started to power the industrial economy.
Electricity is such an integral part of our working life that it is impossible to imagine life without it. Companies just couldn’t operate without power, but it wasn’t always that way. Many business leaders failed to grasp the full potential of electricity after it was first introduced. Over a decade after introducing electricity, they were still building factories by water, despite no longer needing it to power their machinery. These business leaders needed help integrating the new technology into their thinking and that is where the chief electricity officer came in.

Grasping The Potential Of The Web

Although we may scoff at the foolish industrialists with their shortsighted vision, most companies are making exactly the same mistake today with the Web. They are failing to grasp the potential of the Web to revolutionize every aspect of their business. Instead, many have reduced the Web to a marketing tool.
What organizations need is the digital equivalent of a chief electricity officer. They need somebody who will champion digital across the organization until it is as ubiquitous as electricity in the modern work place. Many organizations require a digital evangelist sitting on the board (even if only in a non-executive and part-time capacity) so that digital is fully utilized. However, this should only a temporary requirement.

Our Role As Web Professionals Should Be Temporary

As I have already pointed out, we don’t need chief electricity officers anymore. Once electricity was fully integrated into the organizational processes and culture, their role became superfluous. The same should be true of us as Web professionals.

The Web has much more potential than most of us tend to believe. All you need is to take a closer look. (Image credits: opensourceway)
Whether part of an internal Web team or an external developer, our eventual aim should be to make our role redundant, once digital is a part of daily working life. Once that happens you would no longer need a digital team in the same way as we no longer need a chief electricity officer.
I am aware this may sound like a rather extreme position. It is hard to imagine a world where this is a reality, but I believe we may one day get there. Whether we do is not really the point. The point is that the way we perceive our job is so important and that at the moment the emphasis is slightly wrong.

We Shouldn’t Remain The Owners Of Digital

At the moment, most Web professionals see their job as executing some form of digital strategy. It falls to them to build, maintain and run digital assets from websites to mobile apps. Sometimes we facilitate the contribution of others through the use of a content management system, but ultimately we feel we should ‘own’ digital.
In fact, I have heard many argue that internal Web teams don’t have enough ownership over the Web (something I have written myself) and that external teams are seen as implementors rather than providing more of a leadership role. I have also heard many argue that organizations need a digital strategy and that digital teams should be more empowered within organizations.
All of these arguments I agree with, but feel that although true, they miss the point. Yes, right now we need a strong digital team. Yes, organizations should use external contractors as more than implementors and yes companies need to think about their strategy towards digital. However, these are all transitionary principles. They are merely stepping stones towards a greater aim, which is to make digital ubiquitous within the organization. In the end, we need a business strategy that includes digital, rather than a separate digital strategy.

Our Primary Role Is Knowledge Transfer

If we believe our objective is to make digital ubiquitous, then our primary role as Web professionals is knowledge transfer. It falls to us to teach those within the organizations with which we work, about the potential and power of digital. Ultimately is not our job to own digital or just to build digital assets. Our job is to teach others how to own digital and put in place the assets they need. In the short term this may involve us leading by example. We may need to set a strong digital direction and take ownership over digital as a chief electricity officer did, but eventually we will need to let go of the reins.
Furthermore, if we see our role as educators, facilitators and evangelists then we approach things with a different attitude. Its not about building our digital empire within an organization and wrestling control from the ignorant colleagues that “don’t get digital”. Equally as an external contract our aim is not to ensure a long term revenue stream from clients by making them reliant on our services. Instead it is about facilitating others through improving their understanding of digital.

Digital strategy always requires focus on the essential — on what matters most. (Image credits: opensourceway)
Don’t get me wrong. Many organizations need strong central leadership over digital and the Web team is the place for that. Equally, I have no problem with agencies who work in long-term partnership with clients if that is what is right for the client. However, ultimately we need to be willing to step aside when we have become a bottleneck and when the organization has reached a point when digital is deep rooted across the entire company.

Are You Building An Empire Or Facilitating Change?

It’s time for you to honestly ask yourself what your agenda is. Is it to help organizations facilitate their use of digital or are you more concerned with securing your own position? If it is the latter I would challenge you to think again. By facilitating others and focusing on knowledge transfer you will become the go-to person for innovation and the next big thing. Become so concerned with your own job and you will be the roadblock everybody has to work around to get things done.
Even after 20 years of the Web, we are still at the beginning of a transformation from an industrial to digital economy. Adapting to this change is a huge undertaking for most organizations and we can either be facilitators of that change or we can isolate ourselves as some kind of digital elite.
I know which I choose. What about you?

Hunting or Farming? Which Type of Prospecting is Best?

There are two different types of prospecting, and which you choose depends on how hungry you are.

Hunting

When hunting, you eat what you kill. Hunter prospecting methods involve doing things that get you business immediately. The downside is, you’ll soon be hungry again and need to spend time hunting down new clients. As any jungle predator can tell you, your success rate will vary and there are times you may go hungry for a spell.

Farming

As some point in our pre-history, early Man figured out that planting crops to grow food was less dangerous than taking forays into the forest. Plus, having food around when you’re hungry is a nice perk. But farming takes time—crops don’t just spring up overnight.
But we also learned to domesticate animals, because having a food source corralled in pens eliminated the need to hunt their wild cousins.
So what does this have to do with prospecting? Early settlers pulled up stakes and travelled hundreds or thousands of miles to start a new life. The first thing they probably did after erecting some type of lodging was hunt for food. I doubt they merely planted a few crops and waited until spring before having their first meal. Yet, that’s what many new businesses and startups do—they’ve been told that social media and inbound marketing is where it’s at … and they starve before spring arrives.

So how hungry are you? Early settlers needed to make a kill immediately in order to survive. If you’re just starting out, you need to do the same.
One thing I’ve learned from being in this industry is that each marketing or advertising method has inherent strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, many business owners are looking for the “silver bullet”—the one method that will bring in all the business they need. The reality is that effective marketing is more like a team than a shotgun.
What will you do to get clients immediately? You may be well-connected and begin to generate enough business through your network. (We did.) The trick is to define what “enough business” means to you. If you’re an independent freelancer who needs $4,000 a month to live, take your average sale and divide. If that tells you that you need three new clients a month, how many leads must you generate? If 10 leads lands three new clients, how many people should you talk to each month? Here’s a hint: it’s more than 10. What’s your success rate? Lions catch less than 30 percent of the prey it hunts; cheetahs, 60 to 70 percent. Which are you?
Consistently having conversations with people in your target market is the first step. How are you going to get in front of enough of them? Here’s where the either-or fallacy hurts most freelancers: either inbound marketing is best, or outbound marketing is best. But you can generate plenty of conversations using both cold-calling and social media. The former is hunting, the latter is farming. Cold-calling is more likely to generate a new client immediately; social media less so. Social media is farming—it takes time for the relationship to flourish, but once it does, the prospect is more likely to hire you because of it. Cold-calling’s major disadvantage is that you have no relationship (therefore, no credibility) with the person on the other end of the phone.
Just like those early settlers, your marketing goal ought to be to gradually wean yourself away from hunting and into farming. As your crops begin to grow and you begin to domesticate some wild prospects, you’ll have a barn full to which to market.