I recently discovered David Cain’s Rapititude, and #4 of his 88 truths article really stuck with me: ” 4. The cheapest and most expensive models are usually both bad deals. “

It’s obvious once you put it that way, but in practice, we still get stung by buying the cheap option only to have it fall apart immediately. Or we’re wracked by the buyer’s remorse of the too expensive option, recognizing it was overkill for our needs.

You see this in B2B software transactions too, though because it’s company money rather than my own, we tend to act a bit more removed from the emotion. But in software, “cheap” tends to be less about tangible quality, and instead about the tradeoff you make between price and annoying downsides.

Poor uptime.

Slow support.

Missing functionality.

That last one is particularly troublesome for me, but its inverse, unnecessary functionality, is often the biggest issue with the more expensive option. I used to justify the more premium choice based on the idea that we’d have the functionality if we ever needed it, and later regretting the choice as we never reached that idealized state.

The best way I’ve found to dodge the overkill solutions is to look only at functionality I need today. or at least, in the next 12 months of any contract I sign. Not some aspirational, imagined future where I have the human resources and time to actually leverage excess functionality.

And the best way I avoid the too-cheap solutions is asking what if questions, and talking to my network. If something seems like too good of a deal, it usually is.

There’s this coffee shop that bakes the best homemade biscuits , just down the street from my house. It always has a line out the door. I avoided trying it for years as it just seemed like a huge hassle.

Then one day I gave it a try. I arrived early, right when they opened, to try and beat the line. I got in right away, but immediately noticed – the place is tiny inside. I noticed, as there’s no place for a line to form inside, it formed outside. What seemed like a huge mass of people was really just a few people standing outside. The line moved fast too. It was no worse than any line at a busy Starbucks.

If something appears like a hassle, or too time consuming, or you are otherwise making a judgement based on face value properties – sometimes it pays to dig a bit deeper to confirm their validity first. I’m often surprised that what seemed too hard, or complicated, or time consuming on paper was all just imagined.

My car is in the shop, and the mechanic sent me a text message, rather than call or email, to let me know it was ready to be picked up.

In that context, text messaging works great. I certainly don’t want a call. I never want a call. And even an email lacks some of the immediacy of a quick response. The text message is the perfect means of communication for this sort of thing.

And yet it feels so inappropriate in other settings. I sure as hell don’t want a text message from some tech company trying to sell me on something. And I suspect most people don’t, as SMS just doesn’t seem as ubiquitous in B2B interactions.

Maybe this is an obvious observation, but it’s a worthwhile reminder that context matters in the medium you choose to communicate. Just as SMS isn’t always the right tool for the job, the same can be said of email, advertising, and anything else.

Beyond pure engagement metrics to guide your strategy here, I often return to good old fashioned empathy. If I were in my customer’s shoes, would I love or hate this?

I’ve succeeded and grown in my career, up until a few years ago, purely through my ability to problem solve. And I love to problem solve.

But as I shifted into increasingly more leadership-oriented roles, my roles demanded less of a direct hand in problem solving, and instead indirect guidance for the problem solvers, my team.

Claire on the Signal v Noise blog has a great article on this, and I think it’s the perfect explanation for why so many people struggle in the shift to a people manager role. The problem solving skills that got us the job won’t help us keep it. In fact, unchecked, they may get in the way.

I encountered this early in my manager roles where I tried to lead through subject matter expertise. I wanted my team to see me as a repository for knowledge, who could always step in and take care of the issue if they hit a snag. But for the junior employees I hired, it ended up limiting their resourcefulness and hindering the sense of ownership in their roles.

And for the more senior employees on my team, they simply felt stifled. I’m pretty sure I lost an employee or two because of this early on.

I eventually learned, especially as I started hiring for roles whose expertise was outside of my own, that it’s both impossible to be a SME in everything, and counterproductive.

Sure, sometimes I still need to roll up my sleeves and problem solve, and it’s a delight when I get to do so. But it’s as much a reward in helping my own team recognize they can do the same.

See also: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

It used to be that an immature marketing organization would obsess about activities and leads, while a more mature org would focus on opportunities and revenue. Certainly the latter is better aligned with sales goals, but it’s hardly the furthest a marketing team can evolve to.

Pursuing true measurement of lifetime value should be the next milestone a marketing organization should strive to achieve. Even accurate measurement of that initial opportunity creation can only tell so much – especially for software organizations focused so much on ARR and usage uplift. LTV tells a more complete story of the long term gains, while factoring in cost – probably the least consistently measured area of most B2B marketing orgs.

You still have to measure the clicks and the leads though, contrary to what most ABM advice seems to suggest.

Austin Kleon just wrote about his efforts to limit social media usage on his devices, and there’s some worthwhile tips in there. I tried out the iOS screen time feature, but it tended to have the opposite effect on me. The little reminder that pops up is too easy to dismiss. It’s too easy to just add another fifteen minutes, and pretty soon you’ve defeated the purpose of the whole system.

It’s like saying you’ll have “just one more cookie” when there are still dozens more in the box. It’s pretty hard to stop yourself.

I much prefer the way Android does it, where the app time limits are more binding. The app literally becomes inaccessible once the time limit has been reached. Sure, you can still go into the app settings and disable the limit, but it’s much more of a hassle.

If you’re already a light user of social media and just want to keep yourself in check, perhaps Apple’s approach is sufficient. But I think it doesn’t have nearly enough friction to be very effective for the most of us.

Beyond built in app limits, I’ve been having most of my success with heavy use of do not disturb, airplane mode, and simply leaving my phone behind when non-essential.

Every year there’s some new piece of tech or idea that promises to change everything. Yet almost always, it’s a bunch of hype that everyone gets swept up in, and the net result is small, incremental change.

The latest trend to get this treatment is chatbots. Some friends and I were talking about this in chat earlier – chatbots are pitched as a cure all. But the end result is mostly a cannibalization of existing channels, namely lead forms. I’m not arguing these aren’t an improvement. But they’re certainly not the revolution we were promised. They’re just as tough to maintain, tough to personalize, and still carry with them plenty of challenges. They are trading one set of problems for another.

It’s worth remembering this when comparing the sales pitch or the marketing flash to the actual substance. You should underestimate the benefits and overestimate the potential challenges. It’s less exciting this way, but it’s probably more realistic.

One of the most useful features of Eloqua is the ability to build groupings of filters that you can use over and over in segmentations. You can even modify them, and any segmentations that use them will automatically update to use the new logic. It’s a pretty elegant way to help users leverage common filter logic without needing to remember every last item, and certainly to avoid the issues caused by missing a critical filter.

Of course in Marketo, you can do this with dedicated smart lists, or even segmentations to accomplish a similar effect, but it’s nice to have a purpose-built feature for this sort of thing. A trend I’m seeing a lot with Eloqua functionality.

I’m not a huge fan of using mobile apps for social networking sites like Twitter and Linkedin. Part of it’s because the mobile experiences are basically the same as their more bloated app counterparts, and partly because I don’t want to temptation of distraction on my phone all the time from a native app.

Obviously this is counter to what the app makers want, and so they constantly present messages like “Linkedin works best on our mobile app” to get me to download it, blocking out the top and bottom areas of the screen to try to annoy users into submitting to their requests.

Lately it seems Linkedin is trying something new – the “dismiss” option on these messages now takes at least a few clicks to actually dismiss. Maybe I’m a little too paranoid, and it’s truly a bug, but my money’s on this as a designed feature to discourage users from ever dismissing the message. It’s clever, but also sketchy too, and opens the door to all sorts of possibilities of gaslighting users to behave the way marketers and product owners want by creating intentional errors.

When you’re stuck using basic salesforce reporting or your marketing automation platform, it ends up limiting the extent of the insights you can create from the data.

Of course, you can always play the export to excel and vlookup game, but the tolerance for that, and room for error tends to make that a practice reserved for only special circumstances.

If you’re resourceful, you’ve pushed the power of salesforce reports to their absolute limits, in an effort to maintaining live, easily accessible data and dashboards. But as marketing reporting requirements get more complex, Salesforce ends up outclassed for all but the most basic requests.

Companies talk a lot about data warehouses and BI, but rarely do they have systems accessible to business users to build on. It’s all well and good to want to build a central BI team to be the curators of insights, but without democratized access, this strategy ends up just creating dependence and eventually resentment from departments who want to move quickly.

The first hurdle in building a more data-driven marketing organization is to centralize insights in a common, organization wide data warehouse. But the second hurdle, arguably more difficult, is to make that data resource accessible and useable by the average user. The first step is more visible and flashy. But the second step is the one that actually matters.