Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

Beware of the overconfidence bias. Maybe he’s right.
Fallacy: Perfection Is Perfection
You easily can get stalled in the shift from strategy to tactics because you are
paralyzed by your desire for excellence.
Here’s a good way to rank The Best Plans:
a) Very good
b) Good
c) Best
d) Not good
e) Truly god-awful
Best ranks lower than good? Why?
Because getting to best usually gets complicated. First, can everyone ever
agree on what is best? How long will it take to reach an agreement? How long
will it take to achieve best?
How much excellence in other areas—work environment, productivity, speed
of delivery—will we sacrifice to achieve excellence in this one?
And perhaps most important, will all that excellence really benefit the person
for whom it is intended? Will the prospects or customers care? Will it be worth
the cost to them?
The planning process tends to attracts perfectionists. But something paralyzes
these people: their fear that executing the plan will show that the plan was not
perfect. So rather than risk being found out, these people do nothing. They wait.
Many outstanding big-picture thinkers are always looking for, and burdened
by, this search for perfection. But too often, the path to perfection leads to
procrastination.
Don’t let perfect ruin good.

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Fallacy: Failure Is Failure
Few phobias are more widespread than the fear of failure.
But what is failure?
Robert Townsend, who helped mastermind Avis’s dramatic turnaround in the
1960s, said two of every three decisions he made were wrong.
America’s best pro basketball teams lose the basketball every three minutes
without even getting up a shot.
The legendary golfer Ben Hogan said that in eighteen holes, he usually hit
only two or three balls exactly as he had planned.
Fred Smith got a C on the graduate business school paper in which he
described the concept for Federal Express.
The world champion in baseball has to win only 57 percent of its
championship games.
And no discussion of failure should avoid 3M. 3M went almost two years
without a sale. Then in 1904 they tried sandpaper. Two years later sandpaper
sales were averaging $2,500 a month—on expenses of over $9,000 a month.
William McKnight became the assistant bookkeeper in 1907, settled for stock
instead of cash while the company bounced from blunder to blunder, and retired
with over $500 million in 1978.
There’s little point in killing an idea by saying it might fail. Any idea might
fail. If you’re doing anything worthwhile at all, you’ll suffer a dozen failures.