Are You All In?

One of the biggest perks of my career is that I spend the majority of my day on the phone or engaged in email conversations with clients talking about their goals and visions for their web experience. And while everyone's goals and visions have similarities, they also have major differences, which is what makes it really interesting.

The one thing that I've come to realize is that the clients that find the most success go all in, all the time.

They never talk about "dipping their toe" in the metaphorical water.

There is no "kinda".

There is no "well, we've talked a little..."

It's all or nothing, go big or go home.

A few months ago, I was meeting with a client to discuss their goals specifically around social media. They had questions about using social for lead generation and obvious concerns around compliance issues as a healthcare organization.

However, I explained to them all the things they were missing by not taking advantage of social channels and opened their eyes up to a whole new avenue for customer interaction that they were basically ignoring. Though there were concerns from upper management (and probably still are today), they are now extremely diligent in updating their Facebook page, interact with clients daily via Twitter, and even setup a Linked In group that encourages interaction amongst employees. These interactions and collaboration simply would not be happening without social media, something that they were afraid of primarily because they just didn't know enough about it.

They took a risk -- and the early returns are extremely favorable.

We talk so much these days about risk and reward, but I fear that the number of us willing to go for the big reward are heavily outnumbered by those too fearful of the consequences. In fact, when I'm in a meeting and sense that this is the case, I start walking down the path of how Ektron provides risk aversion for clients, instead of focusing on all the marketing and technology benefits it provides.

Isn't that insane? Focusing on how "safe" a choice our solution is as opposed to how "great" it is -- it just doesn't seem logical to me. But perhaps that's the world we live in today.

I guess the takeaway here is that you shouldn't be afraid to be great, because you might just surprise yourself when you are. I'm not saying that you should completely ignore consequences. If you jump off the cliff and the water isn't deep enough, bad things will happen. However, if you never take a big risk, you'll probably never be as great as you could be.

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