Build It

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to the "Build It" blog.  My name is Jared Willis and in this blog I will cover viewpoints and ideas in the areas of Development, Construction, Reprographics and Sales.

I hope you enjoy the content and please feel free to leave comments or email me using the link to the left. 

Also, it should be noted that the viewpoints expressed here do not necessarily represent those of my current or former employers or their affiliates.

Thanks for stopping by!

Jared Willis

Blueprinter Redux - Follow Up

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about making the word "blueprint" cool again, I saw this article in the San Francisco Chronicle talking about how the public much prefers the word "hospital" over the marketing-speak term "medical center" which is so in use these days.  Here are some excerpts:

"a national survey of 1,027 American adults...showed that way more consumers prefer the term “hospital” to “medical center.

Considering that swarms of U.S. hospitals have transformed themselves to medical centers over the last few years, that’s pretty funny.

Marketers, business gurus, consultants, and others with big contracts and fancy suits convinced hospital executives that “hospitals” were old fashioned, quaint, and way too 20th century. "Medical centers” were cutting edge, high-tech and truly trendy. 

The survey...found that U.S. consumers think a “hospital” would have a wider range of services, would provide better care, would be more up to date and would have more physicians...who are experts in their fields, according to the survey, often by lopsided margins.

“The conventional wisdom for years has been that the word ‘hospital’ was tired and old-fashioned,” said Steve Rivkin, founder of Rivkin & Associates, a marketing and communications consultancy. “As a result, hundreds of hospitals have dropped the word and renamed themselves medical centers.”

"The conventional wisdom is wrong,” said Sandra Bauman, founder of Bauman Research & Consulting, noting that it shows that consumers favor ‘hospital’ across the board, and that results were consistent across lines of gender, age, income, race, region, household income, household size and educational level."

This is exactly what I was talking about.  The industry is tired of being called a hospital, so it invents a convoluted two-word phrase to replace it, yet the consumers think much more highly of the old-fashioned term than the new fangled one. 

That to me is the biggest take-away from this article.  The end-users themselves attributed more and better services to the name they knew best, not the name that was created by the hospital industry.

Was anyone ever really convinced that "reprographics" was the better term?

Here's a link to the article: http://bit.ly/jtNtGy

Here's a link to the study: http://bit.ly/kA0s6k

 

Jared Willis

 

 

Blueprinter Redux

Walking to work this morning, I saw an ad on the side of a bus for a new hospital in San Francisco. The ad stated that they weren't just making a plan for better healthcare, but a blueprint. 

Ironically, it wasn't an actual blueprint, but rather a regular print on blue bond. 

The point is, I got to thinking about the word "blueprint" and how difficult it was for us and the industry to distance ourselves from that "dirty" word. It was nearly impossible. That word just stuck with people and it's obvious that it has a clear and easily understood message for the general populace. 

Instead of tearing your hair out over whether you are called a blueprinter, maybe the adage of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" is best here. 

What if you could could re-popularize the term blueprint?  What if you could take the power back from that word by giving it a different meaning?  Make blueprint cool again by having it mean something totally different.  Don't change the word; change what it means and what it says about what you do.

"Blueprint" is actually a pretty good word, it just has a bad connotation for reprographers.  It's only 2 syllables, 1 word and pretty much everyone understands what you mean when you say it.

I know that we spent a lot of time and money trying to get rid of that word and erase it from our customers' minds, but maybe it's time to put that word to work for us, and not against us.

 

Jared Willis

What happened?

I'm watching a Travel Channel program called "Outer Limits" and they are currently in Seattle showcasing the hydroelectric source of 90% of Seattle's power.  Essentially, in 1903 they built a 10-mile long wooden flume to shunt water from a river down to a hydroelectric plant.  

They built this incredible structure over treacherous mountain terrain, in awful weather and with unsophisticated tools (at least in comparison to what we have today).  However, with all those impediments they were able to construct all 10 miles of wooden flume (with a rail line along the top of it) and the hydroelectric powerhouse in 18 months.

How is that possible?  What happened to construction over the last 100 years that would make that project today take 10 years?  

One of my most viewed posts here is my photo of the new bridge at the Hoover Dam.  The Hoover Dam, one of the world's engineering marvels was completed in only 5 years.  

Construction has gone so terribly wrong, and it remains to be seen if we will ever be able to get back. 

For those of you who wonder the same thing, I suggest reading "Commercial Real Estate Revolution" and "Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets".  Both books are linked from my site and I think have great suggestions as to how to get things back on track.

The Doctor is in...or at least should be

A friend in Repro wrote me recently asking for my opinion on a task he had been assigned by his boss.  Essentially, he was tasked with creating a Powerpoint deck that he could show to potential customers to "educate" them about the company and what they could for the potential customer.  

I had kind of a long-winded response, but liked how it came out so I will post it here.  I have removed the names to protect the innocent, but it would help to understand that this guy's boss has retained a bit of an "old school" sales guy (OSSG) to revamp the sales process.

Here's the email:

"My opinion, and you can choose to share this with your boss or not, is that prescribed and staid Powerpoint presentations are useless, or at the very least, not as effective as we’d like them to be.

People do not agree to meet with salespeople, mostly because they do not want to get a long drawn-out presentation they can’t get out of.  Also, people don’t want answers to questions they’re not asking. 

I always like to think of what happens when you go to a doctor.  The doctor does not come in and talk to you about all the things he’s capable of fixing/curing, or about all the people he has successfully cured in the past.  He comes in and says, “So…what’s wrong?”.  You then proceed to tell him your pains, for which he prescribes the EXACT thing that you need.  You then walk away a happy customer.

Now, you may say, “but a doctor’s capabilities and history of happy patients is important” to which I would respond that yes, it is, but that information is best left for the doctor’s website or some other promotional material (marketing) which draws you in to call the doctor for an appointment.  When meeting with a patient/customer, you should really only be talking about what ails them.  I think everything else is hot air.

What I always tried to do at while in Sales was to go into meetings and always first ask the question, “So…what’s wrong?” and then tailor my approach based on their answers.  A pre-prepared Powerpoint deck would have been antithetical to my sales strategy and I think to good sales in general.  Plus, it would have killed my chances of showing them I was different and worthy of their business and trust.

Privately, regarding the OSSG, I would caution your boss that the OSGG is from an older school of sales.  It is just not a Xerox & IBM sales world anymore.  30 years ago, before the internet, clients didn’t know anything about your products or services (if they weren’t already using you) and couldn’t independently verify facts or lies about your competition that you told your client.  Customers are much more savvy these days.  There is simply so much more information available to everyone via the web that they might know more about your company that a new rep will.  I think OSSG's intentions are good, and I’m always for education of clients, but I think this is going about it the wrong way.  

On top of all of that, people are so used to instant gratification, that I think they want to get right to the point.  It’s probably a little sad that the theatrics of drawing out the sales story may be gone, but that’s the way it is.  There’s no replacement for a well-performing salesperson, but I think it’s silly to force people to take the journey with you to get to an answer for their pain.  “First off, let me tell you about the 50 year history of my company (by year), then give you highly specific technical details about the equipment we use, then I’m going to list 15 things I do that you have no interest in without mentioning the one you really care about and lastly I am going to leave with us both feeling unfulfilled and wondering why when I call you tell me that you are happy with your current vendor.”

 

Jared Willis