I have a secret for you

 I've been scanning the posts on LinkedIn lately, and they are beginning to feel a bit spooky to me.  All of them are following the same formula.  First, they name a big problem that some reader needs to solve, then the post claims to have a secret that will address the issue.  Then, of course, you need to click into the post to learn more, only to find more text building awareness and tension about what the secret is.  I remember fondly the Motley Fool, a site I followed for years, does this type of writing better than anyone.

The Motley Fool will describe an investment that is simply too good to miss, and then go on for several pages about the characteristics, the potential and so on, only to reserve the name of the stock for the last page or link, where you also discover you'll need to subscribe or pay for the information.  After reading all the previous material, there is sort of a sunk cost fallacy about not going ahead and getting the rest of the information.  But this post isn't about the Motley Fool, although it is a good investing site.

What this post is about is how much marketing on LinkedIn, and in other settings, is becoming the same.  If you really have a "secret", why would you share it?  If it is truly a valuable secret, wouldn't you expect that whoever has this secret would want to benefit from it as much as possible, extract as much value as possible, before providing the secret to anyone?  And, if the secret is so powerful, and everyone on the web reads the same post and accepts the idea that the secret is valuable and useful and deploys it, won't every company that deploys the secret be in competition with each other?  In other words, rather than learning something that provides an advantage, each company will be conducting attritional warfare marketing because everyone who reads the post will be doing the same thing.

What I fail to understand in all of this is where true strategy, product market fit, differentiation and alignment to customers's wants and needs got lost.  If you can identify a need that a customer, hopefully a lot of customers have, and test that they acknowledge the need and want to solve it, and test that your solution meets their needs and budget, then you have a good shot at winning in the space.  You don't need secrets from other competitors or vendors.  What you need is insight.

Instead of trusting a secret from someone else, who is sharing the secret with everyone else, go and get your own insight.  Have your product team and marketing team actually meet with customers regularly and listen to their problems and needs.  Don't push your technology, listen to what they are trying to do and solve those things, with your technology, in combination with a partner or in some other way.  In the final analysis, customers want to solve their challenges, and if that is an AI or a smart squid in a lab, as long as it works and creates value, they will be open to buying it.

So, perhaps I am being too hard on "secrets".  Instead of acquiring "secrets" of success from denizens on the web, go work with customers to obtain your own secrets.  If by secrets we mean insights into needs, the importance and urgency of solving a need, and understanding how your solution fits into a larger ecosystem of products and services the customer already has.  

The next time you are scanning LinkedIn, or getting hit with direct marketing or some other marketing or sales gimmick where there is a reference, outright or implied, to a "secret", ask yourself - if you had a valuable secret that could make you money, would you share it?  I would, after I extracted all the value I could from it. Then I would charge you to sell you a secret that was likely far less valuable than I implied. But you do you.

This idea of a secret also addresses another itch - it seems to suggest there is an easy shortcut.  Rather than going out and doing the work, fortunately, someone has done the work for you and will be willing to impart the learnings for a small sum.  There are no shortcuts, especially in sales and marketing today.  You need to do the work, and increasingly that means not just sales people, but marketers, product marketing folks, even heads of development need to be meeting with customers and prospects regularly, to understand what they need, what they want, what they fear, and what they expect will happen next.

The last part of that - understanding what comes next - will be the topic of a future post, where I will impart a secret to you about how to understand and predict the future, for a small fee.