Work In Tech? Please Stop Using These Phrases.

Original Post By http://www.forbes.com/

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Kavi GupptaContributor

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I write about technology's impact on business and culture.full bio →

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I’ve spent 10 years working with companies large and small to help them solve their business problems. Problems like how to improve customer service for electronics giants; imaginative ways to get Canadians to buy more rotisserie chicken; seamless ways to encourage loyalty program members to update their customer data and migrate to a digital only format.

In that time I’ve encountered a wide variety of philosophies, ideas, and processes that have completely boggled my mind. I’m talking about dysfunctional thinking that actually hurts the business, and dangerous phrases that result in the wrong marching orders for teams to execute.

No business is immune from this type of thinking, and I wanted to detail the key phrases that I often hear; so that we’re all aware of the damage we can do to our success.

Let’s stop placing hurdles in our way. Let’s start thinking differently.

“You’re not telling me anything new”

It’s an uncomfortable feeling when a business can admit that what you’ve told them is something they are already well aware of. They just haven’t done anything about it. To get to the heart of a problem, and eventually its solution, a company has to look at its product or service and realize there are things that aren’t working—you’ve spent too much on advertising instead of fixing the product; no one has been paying attention to customer behaviors, but the team has been actively shipping new versions of a product nobody wants; the team is seeing open rates drop, but they keep deploying emails to irrelevant inboxes.

This is a weird form of denial. What you’re seeing is a company attempting to resolve issues without actually paying attention to the core problem. They know they have a problem, but they don’t want to spend the effort to fix it. Instead they focus on other less intensive problems to solve, or decide to go down a completely different path that sends them further away from the real problem. Things like this:

•  Customers aren’t buying because they’re not ready for the product, so the company increases its ad spend to attract people who will
• A company wants to implement a loyalty program but doesn’t want to put the effort into updating its POS to collect data efficiently
• Customers aren’t opening the eblasts the company sends, and hope an increase in deals will catch their attention even if the offer has no relevance to the user

Resist the urge to spin your wheels when you know there is a problem. By the time your head comes out of the waters of denial, it may be too late to try the right approach. Tackle the most difficult problems head on. Don’t optimize around it. That’s just lazy.

“Show me something innovative”

Innovation is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. It’s cool to innovate—you’re disrupting, you’re spurring job creation, you’re finding a solution that’s game changing. It all makes innovation look sexy.

Innovation isn’t sexy. Solving the real problems in business requires some pretty basic, boring, and iterative thinking.

I often shudder when a business wants me to present them a solution that isinnovative.

The problem for most businesses is that an innovative solution isn’t actually the right solution. Often enough, the right solution is something simple, readily available to your resources, and requires moderate but constant experimentation.

Most companies look at innovation as a quick bump in the numbers. A jolt to a stagnant idea because the basics aren’t doing enough or aren’t working at all. Social media gets the brunt of this innovation when a new channel or service is created. Businesses jump on board to ride a potential wave of new audiences, but instead learn that the channel had no purpose for their product; in fact, it did nothing to encourage people to check out their stuff.

Microsoft released one of the first tablet computers, and it took an entirely different company to innovate it to where we are today.

“We need more awareness”

Every startup is clamoring for some form of awareness: press coverage, product reviews, ad clicks and views. It’s a sad and fruitless chase because there is a belief that greater awareness of a business will result in increased sales for that business. Wrong. Here’s why:

1. Awareness doesn’t mean visitors will buy something, or that it will solve the problems customers have been having with your service
2. Droves of people arrive at your site but can’t use the service you’ve promised
3. Higher visibility of your product won’t make it more attractive to finicky buyers, especially if awareness tactics are trying to educate new users
4. Going broad in an effort to attract a higher volume of people to your business is really a move of desperation because you don’t know who your customers are or what they want
5. Awareness is pointless if the company is doing all the talking. Your business is more likely to succeed if happy customers are raving about your experience—don’t build trust by talking about it yourself, have your customer boast how credible you are

Focus on building a business that customers want; a service that people will use. Improve the experience for your customers, and encourage them to share their journey with your product. Have the people who use the product be the advocates your business needs when starting out.

doesn’t matter how different they may seem from each other. Awareness won’t work if the product is broken. The advertising that brought your customers in will be useless if the web experience is terrible. Customer service won’t work if the product is broken. Everything needs to work together. Business has a habit of creating silos between different functions and it has proven to be very inefficient. Think about the sales team that doesn’t care to understand how the product works because they need to push quotas. Think about the developer that creates a feature most customers won’t care about.

Step out of your bubble and analyze the experience from beginning to end. Are your ads displaying the right message to potential customers? Does the web experience match what initially hooked your users? What are your analytics telling you about the experience that can be used to improve your messaging?

These thoughts can’t work alone and neither can the tactics that support them.

Get rid of people who think and work in silos.

“We tried that once, it didn’t work”

Then try it again. I can safely say that very few things in life have worked out successfully the first time. If it takes NASA super small steps to get a manned mission to Mars, then it’s probably going to take your business a long time to find value in a tactic. What I’m trying to say is that big problems take a long time to solve.

I can’t stand when a business says this out loud. It displays an adversity to transform its approach, and that can be such a toxic philosophy for an organization. Emails aren’t opening? Try a different subject line. Maybe the content your email program deployed is irrelevant. Ask your audience what they’d like to see.

Customers aren’t checking out at your cart? Review the process. Maybe they have to enter too much information at once. Maybe they don’t have enough time. Maybe you’re not providing the right information to encourage purchase.

Are customers fleeing your website upon arrival? Maybe you’ve given them a different message from what was advertised. How about letting the customer play with your service immediately, rather than sitting through an education session?

Try it again. Pay attention. Optimize and repeat. Remember how I talked about innovation? This is how you innovate.

“This is how we’ve always done it” 

I absolutely hate this phrase. This phrase is the most frustrating collection of words a company can say out loud.

This phrase says that the company doesn’t want to change. This phrase says that the company doesn’t want to evolve. This phrase says that the company is fearful of what change can bring to its doors. This phrase says that the company is comfortable with mediocrity.

It’s the most dangerous way for a company to commit suicide and alienate its customer base and workforce. If someone in your organization is saying this, they need to rethink their purpose in the company.

It’s because of these phrases that companies fail.