Dang.

I was chatting with a colleague the other day when I was blindsided by a sports metaphor.

(And not that sports metaphor.)

I have a closely held bias against sports metaphors. Still, I’ll admit that sports metaphors can be pretty powerful, as long as they don’t fall into the wrong hands.

(Speaking of which, could Nicholas Cage use sports metaphors to kidnap the president? Absolutely. If Nicholas Cage can steal the Declaration of Independence for the sole purpose of squeezing a lemon over it, Nicholas Cage can do anything.)

Anyway, here’s what hit me:

Suppose you’re a tennis player and you get a new coach, and the coach tells you, “Hey, 87 percent of the successful players on tour run around their backhand 90 percent of the time, so you need to start running around your backhand.”

You’re dumbfounded. You reply testily, “Have you ever seen me play? I have the best backhand on tour.”

The coach answers, “I don’t need to see you play. I know what the successful players on tour do, and if you want to be a successful player you need to start doing that.”

At which point you either tell that coach to get lost and find a coach that’s willing to leverage your strengths, or you follow her advice, become just another predictable player who runs around her backhand, and plummet down the rankings.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t a sports metaphor. Maybe that was a sports parable. Whatever.

The point is this: In sports, this sort of exchange would be ludicrous. In business it’s the norm.

Too many outside entities come in with too limited a knowledge of their client’s business and too small a toolbox, and encourage their clients to run around the best backhand on tour. And too many clients don’t know their own business, take the advice and suffer the consequences.

Let’s look at where the blame lies:

Photo Credit: Martin Sanchez via Unsplash.

With the outside entity

I’ve worked with and for a lot of consultancies and agencies in 30-plus years, and I can count on my fingers the number of outside firms – my own included – that have dived into their client’s business with what I consider to be an appropriate level of thoroughness.

That's really not an indictment. These entities bring tools and count on the organization to provide context.

The problem, of course, is that the entity really should be digging deep and supplying some of the context, too.

It's nice, and good, to have tools that can be transported across companies, and components that can be quantified and brought into a more-or-less custom package of services. Having been there and done that, I can tell you that it sure is convenient.

However, every company’s structure, culture, management style, competitive landscape, customer experience, goals, strategies, tactics, silos, and dynamics are unique.

Any entity and its off-the-shelf solution that doesn’t completely account for these is going to fall short by definition.

Fatally so? Probably not. But the solution will be less optimal than one where an outside firm completely analyzes all the pertinent data across the enterprise, augments it with qualitative and quantitative research, and then delivers a unique, custom package.

Or if an organization does it themselves.

Photo Credit: Nik MacMillan via Unsplash.

With the organization

Okay, I'm gonna give it to you straight: There is nothing an organization can buy and no one they can hire that can take the place of that organization thoroughly and innately understanding who they are, who their customers are, and why they're here.

Too many organizations lack that basic level of self-awareness. Here are some of the reasons why:

Inadequate data. They don’t get enough information from their customers when they have the chance.
Dispersed data. I don’t like to say “disorganized data” or “too much data,” because I believe either is rarely the case. Data has inherent organization almost by definition. The challenge is not an overabundance of data, or data that’s just a bunch of numbers rolling along incoherently. The challenge is pulling it together.
Non-normalized data. Now we’re getting somewhere. The big problem with data isn’t that we don’t know our number of Facebook likes, our NPS, or our search ranking. The big problem is that we don’t know how to make them all play together, so you can understand the value of a Facebook like versus a 7 on the NPS, and what those numbers mean in the bigger picture.
Qualitative tools are shunned. There’s a lot of knowledge locked within the members of an organization, knowledge that can lend depth and dimension to data.

Organizations almost invariably ignore or devalue qualitative knowledge, mainly because they either can’t get at it or don’t know what to do with it once they get it.

(In defense of organizations, outside entities routinely ignore and devalue qualitative knowledge, too, often because it falls outside of most of their models and processes.)

The ultimate answer

To me, this is easy. The ultimate answer is one of two answers:

Hiring an outside entity that’s committed to a custom customer-experience solution, ideally without the custom-package price tag; or
Training internal resources to do the same thing.

And wouldn’t you know, both of those are what we do at Polymath Research + Marketing.

Listen: If your backhand is your best stroke, don’t run around it. Find a resource that can maximize it.

And if you decide that resource is us, so much the better.

Contact us here.

The Tennis Coach, the Backhand, And The Trouble With Agencies (And Their Customers)