Nugget #13 - When everyone zigs, you zag.

Seth Godin wrote an amazing book called “Purple Cow”. The macro concept is pretty simple.

Imagine driving down a country highway. It’s all farm land and rolling hills. Off in the distance you see an ordinary sight - a herd of cows. Brown cows, black & white spotted cows, nothing new. Unremarkable. It barely registers to pay any further attention to them.

But then, all of a sudden, you see something different. Something you’ve never seen before. A purple cow!

It’s shocking. It makes you pull over to the side of the road and look at it.

The moral of the story is you don’t need to be "better” to capture attention, you need to be remarkably different.

That’s the way we can think about differentiating ourselves. When everyone is going in one particular direction, find an opportunity to move in a different way that allows you to stand out.

When I was starting my career at memoryBlue, they had these “new hire packets”. First 48 days we were asked to hit X number of metrics daily (dials, conversations, talk time, etc.)

I never did them. It made no sense why everyone did it.

My focus was 1. make my client happy, and 2. book as many qualified opportunities as possible.

Everything else besides actions that aligned to those focuses was fluff. Including making an arbitrary number of dials whether or not there was correlation to success.

I was one of the top 2 sellers at the company for my tenure. I achieved remarkable performance because I decided not to be a brown cow.