Do better, not just more

I remember throughout my career, every time the economic situation was tightening, I kept hearing from my bosses and other executives to "do more with less".  And needless to say, every time I heard that phrase, I found it extremely insulting.  As if I wasn't already doing more with less?!!  To me it always sounded as if I was being told I was getting fewer resources (and perhaps needed to cut people), more work is getting piled on me, and that it really doesn't matter what the quality of the results are.

What people don't realize is that one **can** instead focus on getting more (even with fewer resources) by doing things better.  And doing better doesn't necessarily mean doing more.

So how would you just do better?  The key to the answer if finding how to do better with less.  In my opinion, doing so relies heavily on how open you are to adopt new ideas.  Doing better with less means not necessarily doing the same but instead finding ways to fundamentally create a **positive** change (and not necessarily change for the sake of change).

Let me clarify with an example: Let's say you spent $5,000 on a trade show and collect 500 leads.  500 for $5,000 leads may be a great or mediocre outcome depending on the industry, the trade show itself, etc.  so take that just as an example.  There are tons of ways to try to do better with less - one example being just improving the booth messaging (more clear, more targeted, more interesting, etc.) and hence spending $3,000 to shooting to get 600 leads  However, do get the more dramatic value is to step out and think about why you're attending trade shows in the first place.

In my consulting practice, most clients are going through severe cost/benefit analysis, especially on trade shows.  What is driving this re-evaluation is the change that is taking place in sales and marketing in general.  Up to recently, marketing was what I refer to as "broadcast" marketing - the vendor(s) as well as users closely associated with the vendor(s) broadcast an integrated message to a target audience.  In the last few years (predominantly since 2004), sales and marketing is taking on more of an "engagement" model.  Marketers are not engaging target audiences in discussions and make their (still integrated and campaign-driven) points through communities, discussions, and blogs.

If you think engagement marketing only applies to consumer market, you're fooling yourself.  In 2005, when I was VP of marketing and business development at Calypto, I was pitched by our PR agency to start looking at blogs as a way to reach our audiences.  My reaction was that I was being **pitched** for more services and ultimately being asked to spend more money with the agency (which I'm sure was partly the case).  So I dismissed the idea quickly.  Blogging was probably too early for the deeply technically rooted electronic design industry, but I do acknowledge that I wasn't being open to doing things "better".  Three years later, and I see evidently that smart marketers, even in the electronic design industry, are turning into leveraging communities and blogs to reach their audiences **better** (and doing it with less resources).

Another example: Virtual trade shows have been around for a couple of years now - but they're built on the conventional broadcast marketing paradigm.  Virtual trade shows **could** probably allow you to do more with less.  However, there are key new technologies out there to accommodate the shift to engagement marketing.  One great example is Xuropa.  Xuropa is a new community (with all of the bells and whistles), built around the electronic design community, which enables user-user and user-vendor discussions, engagement, and even collaboration.  It not only provides for broadcast marketing, but these days we're dealing with a whole new set of sophisticated users who dislike being broadcasted to and would rather prefer to have an active voice with their vendors.

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Bottom line:  There are many ways to approach the "need to do more with less" pep talk.   However, to "get the most" you might need to step out of the box and look for new ways and technology to exceed your objectives.  Doing this might also avoid turning off your employees by the pep talk, and instead motivate them and bring new energy during the budget crisis.