There are a lot of solutions for funding a business beyond dipping into your own personal savings and acquiring venture capital which can not only be difficult but also compromise the amount of control you retain over your enterprise. There are incubator and accelerator programs popping up all over the country. Brian Cork’s Accelerator program and Shotput Ventures are just two examples here in the Atlanta area…

Jeff Hilimire of Shotput Ventures will be on Gravity Free Radio this morning and Brian Cork was on earlier this year talking about their programs. Enjoy!

Obviously not everyone is an idiot. Sure, let’s be honest we all know a few — um — interesting people but very few folks I know would classify the majority of their acquaintances as such. So if relatively few people are, in fact, actual idiots, why are so many marketers and business owners so eager to dumb down their messages in an ill-conceived effort to make sure that every silly objection is answered ahead of time?

It seems to be a natural and nearly irresistible impulse to clutter our communications with the most mundane information about our products and services because we’re afraid that our customers aren’t going to “get” what we’re selling and so we feel compelled to tell them absolutely everything.

I say that if your customers don’t understand what you’re trying to tell them, don’t complicate things by telling them it comes in other colors, has six lights built in and can be used in the living room just as easily as it can in the family room. Instead, why not simplify the message? The reason the iPod became so popular has something to do with the elegant design and those famous white earplugs, but unlike the many MP3 players that came before it, iPod never talked about technology and features or any of that. They focused on a single message: “all your music, anywhere you are”, communicated clearly and concisely in all of their communications and often without a single written word other than “iPod”.

Maybe we all can’t get away with doing things as cleanly as Apple does, but the principle applies to businesses of all sizes and in all industries. Simple messages work best. Think about all the greatest lessons you’ve ever learned in your life… Odds are you can easily sum them up in a sentence or less. So why would you need three pages to tell someone about a basic product or service?

When I start complicating things because I’m afraid my audience won’t get it, maybe I should be wondering whether or not I even get it…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the importance of being proactive. It was a big topic of conversation with Brian Patrick Cork on our radio show last month and numerous events and conversations since has kept it in my head.

It seems that a lot of people have expectations of success, both personally and in business. But what are you doing to achieve that success? I was talking with a corporate manager who had given had review meetings with each of her five employees. The two who had been at the company the longest had questions: “I’ve been here for three years, why haven’t I been promoted? Why have we hired other people from the outside?”

Her response was simple, “You didn’t ask for it. You didn’t apply, you never expressed any interest in those other jobs and you never even expressed a desire or willingness to take on more responsibility. Why should we have considered you?”

The same thing holds true in business and certainly in sales and marketing. Just “being there” isn’t enough. You need to decide what you want your company to achieve and you need to take action. The time is past for many of us where we can simply hang a shingle and expect business to line up outside our front door.

Whether they are friends, clients, prospects, colleagues, vendors or partners you should never be afraid to tell people what you want for your business and how they might help you achieve it. All too often we wait for opportunities to come to us when we should be kicking doors open for ourselves.

I couldn’t sleep last week and ended up watching a late-night repeat one of my favorite shows: Diners Drive-In + Dives on the Food Network. Yes, I am hopelessly addicted to nearly all programming around the preparation of, history of and consumption of food. Except those seemlingly daily cake-baking contests but I digress.

Back to my original point… One of the restaurants being featured on Triple D that night was renowned for their lasagna — a dish that is not on the regular menu, only made periodically as a special. So they started a “lasagna list”, a log of devoted patrons that wanted a phone call every time the restaurant made lasagna.

Consider the marketing value of such a thing and consider the quality of relationship you need to have with a customer — especially in a relatively anonymous business like food service — in order to not only acquire a personal phone number for marketing purposes but to also expect that your customers will alter their behavior based on hearing from you.

And although it never hurts to have a killer pasta dish on your side just about any business can take a lesson from the lasanga list, no time in the kitchen required. If you take the time to think about it, there’s probably something going on in your business that your customers would enjoy hearing about every once in a while.

Note also that in the age of social media, there are lots of ways you can engage with your customers without hopping on the phone or doing the typical email newsletter. Your lasanga list could easily be maintained through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube. These are all great ways to remind people you do business with about what makes your business special and why they probably started working with you in the first place.

I recently had an experience with a client who had just crowdsourced their new logo. They opened the project on a web site along with a description of what they were looking for and the promise of a few hundred dollars to be awarded to the guy or gal who contributed the winning logo. They received more than 40 submissions in a matter of days from about 20 different designers.

Before I go on, I would like to freely disclaim that I used to run a corporate marketing communications department and, while serving there I did on occasion ask for spec work, or sample designs to be done prior to the start of any formal engagement as with no expectation of payment… But from agencies and on larger projects like our major web design initiatives.

When a company does that kind of shopping, they are looking to develop a long-term relationship with a brand name agency that will ultimately be able to earn several hundred thousand to several million dollars or more in revenue over the life of their engagement with the client. Asking that the agency contribute a couple of thousand dollars in man hours as an initial investment is both reasonable and justified.

This, however, is not what happens in a crowdsourced design project. 20-50 relatively anonymous freelance designers (identified only by their online handle) may submit in the hopes that they will earn a prize of a few hundred dollars and are then unlikely to hear from the client ever again. In our case, the client I mentioned earlier had already awarded us their web design project before they had even notified the winner of the logo project. And there is just something ethically wrong with asking a (virtual) room full of people to each perform a service that is worth several hundred dollars on the condition that only one of them will actually be paid for their efforts.

But it’s a free country. If freelance designers, students and mac jockeys want to try their luck on crowdsourcing dollars, I won’t stand in their way. The AIGA has already made their ruling on this matter as have several other prominent groups, blogs, etc. (be sure to also check out No!Spec for a running commentary on this issue). It isn’t my place to tell any creatives outside of my employ how to earn their living.

It turns out, however, that it is my place to tell small and mid-sized business owners how to spend their marketing dollars wisely.

So here’s my opnion on the virtues of crowdsourcing from a client’s point of view: don’t do it, it is NOT to your advantage. You are participating in an environment where designers have to “play the odds” to decide how hard they will work on a particular concept and a high value is placed from a designer’s point of view on the quantity of submissions rather than their quality.

You are NOT getting an audience with someone who will take the time to learn your business before attempting to design for it, you are NOT paying for a designer’s undivided attention and you are NOT engaging in a relationship with someone who cares about (or who stands to benefit from) the success of your business.

All you are getting is a shotgun blast of quick design work from designers who are throwing as much out as they can, trying to play the odds and make something stick. From your perspective as client, you’re just throwing the dice and hoping that something usable comes out of it. Unless you truly see design as a commodity and don’t see any value in working with someone who willl approach your project strategically, crowdsourcing just doesn’t make a bit of sense from a business owner’s point of view.

As for my client who crowdsourced their logo before they engaged with us on the web design, they got lucky. There was a single shining diamond among a batch of poorly-conceived work and their new logo is actually pretty nice. Out of curiosity though, I clicked on the profile of the person who created it and noticed that the concept for the winning design had been lifted from another design they had presented (and won) a couple of weeks earlier for a different client.

But I suspect that’s just the nature of the game.

Please share your thoughts on crowdsourcing, I would love to hear them especially as this continues to be a hot topic in the business.

It should be no surprise to anyone in the business of selling anything nowadays that sales cycles are being lengthened by our poor economy. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just spring forward to the point that our prospects were actually ready to buy? And without losing an hour of sleep?

Well, it doesn’t work that way. It’s taking everyone a little longer nowadays to close business and it seems that instead of complaining about it, we should consider ways that we can use this extra lag time to our advantage.

A couple of sales people pushing an Internet marketing solution came into our office the other day. They didn’t have an appointment; apparently they were walking the building and introducing themselves. They asked if we might be interested in purchasing said marketing solution. I told them that I was familiar with their solution and that several of our clients use it.

I let them know that we were not interested as of this point, but that since our business was actually a marketing agency, we might be interested in scheduling a time to sit down and discuss ways we might refer business to each other. I thought this was a nice invitation to extend the conversation and develop a relationship that could be mutually beneficial whether we ever used their service or not.

They expressed some interest at the time, though they did not follow up for several days and their follow up was essentially a one sentence email referencing attached articles lauding the wonders of their service. It seems that these guys had one goal and one goal only in mind — to make a quick sale. And even worse, they ignored all the feedback I had given them throughout our discussion: yes, I am familiar with what you do, no I am not interested in purchasing and maybe, since we have complimentary businesses, we should look for ways to refer business.

Instead, they seemed bent on selling me now based on a five minute conversation had during a cold call. This all goes back to what I wrote about last week regarding value. Show me that you’re willing to listen to my needs, show me that you’re truly interested in my business and show me how you can save me time or money and we can build a long term relationship. There are no shortcuts, no “spring 1-hour aheads”, no “Advance to Go, collect $200″ in sales and marketing today. In fact, I believe the shortest route to a sale in this environment is in relationship building and creating trust.

And side note… No matter what industry you’re in, whether it’s marketing, real estate, technology, etc., there’s no reason to buy from a complimentary firm in your industry that isn’t willing to give you referrals in exchange for your business. It’s a demonstration of a deeper partnership and a long-term commitment to your company’s success.

Kraft Foods unveiled a new logo this week to the chagrin of a lot of folks in the design world. Oh, and before you start shedding nostalgic tears for the old Kraft logo, it’s important to note that this change applies only at the corporate level; you won’t be buying mac and cheese stamped with this cluttered nonsense anytime soon. But before we judge too harshly, let’s hear what Kraft CMO Mary Beth West had to say about the change (source, BrandWeek):

“In some ways, this really is all about Kraft Foods. It’s about our next step in the evolution of getting ourselves to top-tier performance. Going forward, it defines, unifies and simplifies our employees and gets everyone thinking about one common purpose.”

OK, I get it, the new logo is going to make employees work harder and will unify them more than a decades old American icon, known and loved by millions. Wait — maybe I don’t get it.

The point is that this is a crossroads that every mature company will one day come to: “We need to update our look before it gets completely dated. Do we wipe the slate clean and start from scratch or do we build on the equities we already have?”

Here’s my answer: if the name, philosophy, products/services or values of a company change substantially then, yes — why not start from scratch? In any of these cases, you have little to gain by leveraging people’s attachments to your old ideas. But otherwise, I usually prefer to refresh a look wherever possible and retain some of those “little details” that your customers recognize. Over the past couple of years I’ve been a fan in particular of the way Delta and Toys ‘R’ Us handled their rebranding efforts utilizing great designs that allowed them to make a fresh presence in the market while preserving — and paying homage to — their heritage.

Kraft Foods didn’t need to do this in my opinion, especially if it’s for the reasons West outlined in BrandWeek. I don’t see any real redeeming qualities from a design perspective and I have to imagine that the employees Kraft is trying to unite under this flag are scratching their heads as much as we are.

In fact, consider this: a lot of negative response this week has stemmed from the fear that this cluttered, garbled thing is going to end up on the American cheese package, ursurping a familiar icon. That feeling of loss must be even worse at the corporate level being that not only do those employees know and use the products, but they actually help make, sell and distribute them. If Kraft really felt it was time to update their corporate image I believe they would have been better served by staying closer to their original design.