What Makes You So Damn Special?

What’s your delta?

Just another buzzword, right? Delta is what makes us special, right?!

But delta is NOT how we're different from our competitors in price, service, mission or model.

It's not how unique or special we are. That's self-serving flattery, not marketing. That's narcissism not mission, vision or virtues.

That’s where delta goes wrong.

Arnoldo Hax of MIT Sloan School gets credit for helping us see when delta is delta and when it’s not.

A life of teaching management and his 2009 The Delta Model: Reinventing Your Business Strategy are a good start to discover the difference delta makes to being different.

But first a disclaimer – Hax uses business buzzwords unapologetically to win over his audience. But his audience is not our audience… his audience is not our customers, stakeholders or supporters. So when he says things like, “Strategy is the most central issue in management,” please don’t repeat that and hope to succeed in your marketing, communications or messaging.

Delta spells success... or failure...

Instead, let’s do some learning and translating because what Hax calls delta is what we are all desperately searching for and need to succeed.

Why a ‘new’ business strategy? Because everything has changed – call it e-Everything and it’s time to shift from the competition to the customer. As in, adapt or embrace extinction.

They’re called Haxioms (ugh… of course they are... a buzzword of buzzwords) and the Delta Model uses them to build while tearing down high-minded, introspective and operationally-obsessed mission language and strategy.

If it comes from a conference room whiteboard, it probably spells trouble.

(You know, the kind of things we group-think on whiteboards in conference rooms and then ask someone to take a photo of so we’ll remember how we changed the world in this meeting kind of things!)

Haxiom #1 – the customer is the center of your strategy. As in, NOT our competitors, NOT our operations team or model, and NOT our C-suite leaders.

Everything we do serves the customer and this means marketing is before engineering, and a value proposition (what’s this worth to our customer) is before metrics. A great product, service, or good deed is not great (or sustainably good) without a value-add to the lives of customers, stakeholders or supporters.

Marketing and messaging are first, not last

Haxiom #2 – winning is customer-community, not beating the competition. A relationship built on trust and transparency is earned, and we know it’s real when they’d miss not having us in their lives.

Haxiom #3 – it’s love, not war. Life, like commerce, money, relationships and so much more, is more than a zero-sum game.

In a world of scarcity, everyone is our competitor. But in a world of generosity and gratitude, we are givers, not takers. (Every single nonprofit should look like this – but few do!)

“Carmel ribbon crunch Frappuccino for Villanelle!”

Haxiom #4 – we serve, we don’t supply products or services, and our supply-chain is part of our identity. We are guides. We connect by creating relationships that can be acted-out and experienced (think ‘Shop local’ or why names are part of your Starbucks fix – can you say “Carmel ribbon crunch Frappuccino for Villanelle”).

Haxiom #5 – strategy is done one customer at a time, stressing depth over, well, strategy. This makes it all very, very labor intensive – marketing, customer service, even the typical rallying cry of a mission statement that checks a box.

Another way of expressing this relative – deeper, closer, better – of Delta Model practices is to work from the psychographic of our market. How they feel drives buying and giving more than the demographics of zip code or age. And it always involves questions - open-ended questions.

Haxiom #6 – reject the truisms ‘the customer is always right’ and ‘we know more than our customers’ – because both assume too much. The transaction, sale or donation is satisfying (and repeatable) only when accomplished jointly.

And this is maddening to structure-driven, operationally-minded organizations

It’s easy to see the call for creativity in measuring success in this version of the Delta Model. And that’s maddening to structure-driven leaders and operationally-minded organizations. With this in mind, let’s do some blunt assessment from what we can learn from Hax’s Haxioms…

1.   There’s no room for debate. One of the most difficult features of empathy and emotional intelligence is the take-it-or-leave-it of embracing others’ drives and frustrations to frame our own. In a world where we each have our single-minded Why? to learn and live, the Delta Model simply leaves behind lesser skilled negotiators of marketing and enterprise pursuits. That’s as cold as it is ironic.

2.   But there is space for reverse engineering. We already have products, services or good deeds to offer, and the call to start with the customer is impossible without our own personal DeLorean and Doc. But we can reverse engineer how we practice our strategies by learning and translating from those who not only do what we do, just better, and serving as guides instead of heroes to the story we’re telling. It comes down to trust through questions vs. selling or coercing through overcoming objections.

3.   Only God knows and you’re not God. This isn’t a religious assertion, it’s a power-practiced assertion. Sometimes we fall into the personally rewarding trap of knowing better and complaining, “You need to understand” as a way of meeting objections or disinterest. But creating space (in response to the problem-solving we should provide) can also show a clear path to both avoid consequences and provide value or upside – even in spending or giving.

No, they don't 'need to understand' - we do

One final story to bring this home… Sitting across from someone I’d cultivated carefully (but maybe not carefully enough) to support a nonprofit, I asked open-ended and dangerous questions like, “You’re a generous person – why is that?” and “You’ve listened carefully to what I’ve shared about [this nonprofit], what makes it interesting to you?”

His responses illustrated Haxiom #6 so clearly, I had to temper my excitement over believing I’d figured-him-out.

He wasn’t (yet) clear about what this nonprofit offered – to the end-beneficiaries or to him if he’d make this mission possible. And he wasn’t even close to valuing the experience of giving and what that adds to our lives. But these ‘misses’ wouldn’t stop me from taking his money and educating him later.

The most interesting part of our conversation was that he started to realize how incomplete and unsatisfying his responses were. He didn’t quite know why he wanted to be generous, and he didn’t know what it felt like to have this nonprofit active in others’ lives – for them and for him.

So I offered him this option – you’ll never know until you begin to give. You can’t begin to answer your questions (my questions which he’d embraced) from the sidelines.

You'll never know until you...

Years later he’s still using his generosity to discover the “slightly-better world” he wants to see (that’s how he started to say it)… I hear about him from an old friend at that nonprofit, and he occasionally asks for “that guy who asked me what I wanted” when he calls. She admits people don’t really know how to respond, but they’re forced to learn and that’s a few Haxioms at work!

Thank you for learning with me, and now you can work through your answer to the question: What makes you so damn special?

- James Callahan

For more on Arnoldo Hax and The Delta Model: Reinventing Your Business Strategy.

#management #marketing #nonprofit #communications #fundraising