My last post, The Hip Bone Connected To The Thigh Bone….. , started a discussion about systems, that is how things work, interrelate, and the dependencies they have on each other.  I focused specifically on how we acquire and retain customers, focusing on sales and marketing as separate, but tightly related systems.  Changes we make in components of our  marketing systems impact the overall marketing system and impact the corresponding sales systems — and vice versa.  For example, if we gear up a major new sales prospecting initiative to acquire new customers in a certain market segment, but we don’t have the corresponding marketing programs to support the sales initiative, we will probably not achieve our goals. 

One of the things about tightly interlinked and interdependent systems is that changes made in one subsystem may have an impact on other subsystems–some closely linked–some very distant.  Often the people making those changes are unconscious of the impact of what they are doing on others.  They may be doing the best job possible, but their view is primarily of their own subsystem.  We forget to take into account the “whole.”

Now let’s turn the crank one more time and look at the new world of buying, selling, customer and community interactions.  After all, our marketing and selling systems exist only to serve the customer’s need to buy and their buying system.  There is no purpose for sales and marketing without this. 

Let’s start with customer buying — after all, they need to be at the center of things. From our own points of view, we tend to overlook customer have many interlinking systems and processes they must manage within their own organization to “buy.”  They have to align different functions, people, agenda’s, goals, requirements to make the best decision for their organizations.  It’s very difficult and complex.  However,  I’ll hold on that discussion for a much later date.  For the purposes of this article, let me focus on the systems that interface with the customers buying decisions and how they are connected.

In the “old days, “  It used to be our marketing and selling processes and systems were oriented to creating awareness, interest, demand, need and fulfilling a buying requirement for a customer.  Our marketing and sales systems were oriented around informing and educating prospective customers.  In fact, our customers depended on us, and our competition,  to do this well, so they could evaluate and purchase the right solution.  Sometimes there were outside things — like those pesky anaylsts–that helped to inform the customer about our products and those of the competition.  But we accommodated those in our marketing and selling systems.  Some how this model of buying and selling was very efficient and worked for decades.

However, the world of buying is changing rapdiley and profoundly.  This thing called “social media” one of the things that has turned the world of buying upside down.  Buyers are no longer depending on our sales and marketing–or that of our competition–to be informed and educated about solutions.   Buyers are using communities of users, other informed people, and even those with an axe to grind for their information on trends, issues and solutions.  They are engaging communities of associates around the world, learning about their experiences with those products and solutions.

Customers changing the way they buy, changing their “system” in ways that are “designing” our sales and marketing efforts out of the process—or at least significantly redesigning our roles.  They are moving quite aggressively, relying on what they perceive as better sources of insight through communities on the web.  As you may recall from my last article, not only are the customers changing the way they buy, they are changing their “interface definitions.”  Remember, the value of common interfaces helps ease the challenge of optimizing systems.  If we keep the interface definitions constant, we can re-design the systems on either side of the interface.  Once the interface changes, everything on both sides has to change.

It’s this “interface” change that creates one of the greatest challenges for us.  It mandates we change the way we design our marketing and sales systems.  Yet too often, we continue, somewhat wishfully or wistfully, with the way we always used to do things.  We wonder why our marketing and sales programs are no longer producing the result they used to.

The new “interfaces” are being defined.  Our customers are doing this now by redefining the way they buy.  Sales and marketing needs to claim a place at that table–both responding to the new interfaces the customer is designing and advising the customer on more effective and efficient buying process design. 

We need to redesign our sales and marketing systems to accommodate these new interface and systems.  There are new participants in the system–communities of up to thousands that all have some impact on the way the system works.  Some have strong interactions, some are much weaker.  We need to understand these new participants in the systems and make sure our systems work with them.

I’ll stop here.  Perhaps I’ve been a little long winded in my explanation, but we can no longer be designing how we market and sell by focusing on our own organizations and functions.  The customer has always been a major part of the design, but there are new players we need to include in our thinking.  If we don’t someone else might–making their system much more effective.

After-note, otherwise known as “Confessions of a struggling blogger.”  As I re-read this post, I’m not sure I’ve done what I had set out to do justice.  I think it’s fairly easy to talk about the interrelationships of our internal systems and processes, like marketing and sales.  I’m struggling with finding the right words to explain how we cannot design these in isolation, and that we must engage buyers and the community in that design.  Likewise, customers can’t design their buying processes/systems in isolation, but must also engage sellers and the community in that design.  Is there a better way to express it?  Can you help clarify what I am clearly stumbling to explain?

No, I’ve not decided to convert this blog into a lesson on Anatomy, I actually want to talk about systems.  But I don’t mean systems–technology, I mean systems–the way thing work, how things interrelate, specifically in acquiring and retaining customers.

The way we acquire and retain customers is a complex inter-relationship of different activities and processes.  These processes occur within our organizations, for example through sales and marketing, with our customers–their buying processes, and in the surrounding community–our competition, opinion leaders, and others.  All these “subsystems” are connected together, they depend on each other, respond to each other.  Likewise, these systems don’t work well in isolation or without the other systems.  For example, a selling process is meaningless unless aligned with a customer engaged in a buying process.

The complexity of these systems and their relationships cause us to break them down, focusing on subsystems and components.  We start to specialize in these subsystems, for example, marketing may focus on demand and lead generation.  We in sales focus on our selling processes.  It’s a natural and probably the only way to manage the complexity and begin to design, develop, execute and manage our customer acquisition and retention processes.

Designers and engineers try to manage the complexity of the interrelationships between subsystems by trying to define clean interfaces–defined inputs and outputs.  The theory being as long as we keep the inputs and outputs the same, we can change anything within the subsystem and not have an impact on the overall system performance.  We try to do that as we define our marketing and selling processes — it’s perfectly reasonable and puts some manageability to what we do. 

Designers and engineers design subsystems, trying to keep clean interfaces, optimizing the overall system.  Here’s where some of the challenge comes in.  First, as much as we try, it’s very difficult to keep clean interfaces — even in designing “products.”  For example, when we develop mechanical assemblies, we design within certain tolerances.  As we try to fit those parts together, each subsystem that worked on its own–used the expected inputs and delivered the expected outputs, now the system as a whole doesn’t achieve it’s objective.  In the case of mechanical assemblies, this problem is called “tolerance stack-up.”  Each part meets its tolerance requirements, but when I try to fit them all together, they don’t fit.

We see the same thing in out processes for acquiring and retaining customers.  Marketing may define a perfect lead nurturing and qualification process, it may fit the “specs” perfectly; but when it is “assembled” with the sales lead/qualifiation process, it blows up and doesn’t work.  Something is lost in the interfaces, something is lost in the interrelationship of these processes.

The problem gets more complex — at least with sales and marketing.  Designers and engineers know that all the subsystems must come together and work as a whole.  They understand that missing major subsystems means the thing doesn’t work.  A car without a braking system doesn’t works very effectively as a car.

We seem to forget the need for “clean interfaces” and the view of the “whole,” looking at our customer acquisition and retention processes–sales and marketing.  CSO Insight’s 2010 Sales Performance Optimization Study provides some interesting clues about these issues.  We design our sales prospecting strategies around achieving certain goals and objectives, yet we cut marketing budgets for lead generation.  We base our quotas around certain sales performance levels, but we cut training budgets so we don’t develop the skills of sales people to perform at the expected levels.

Now let me add another level of complexity.  In sales and marketing, the interfaces are never clean.  Moreover, they are constantly changing.  Using my car analogy, it’s kind of like installing a new braking system while driving at top speed on a curvy mountain road–covered with ice.  It’s not a trivial problem to solve.  One of the ways we start managing this is simple, we start talking to each other.  The days of marketing and selling “silo’s” are over.  We have to have to coordinate our programs, processes, goals, investments.  We need to start collaborating.  We need “interlock” what we do with the other functions in our organization.  (As a side note, Andrew Rudin is looking at this same issue from a slightly different perspective, “Fools Gold:  Searching For The Most Important Step Will Ruin Your Sales Process.”  Take the time to read it, it reall compliments some of the points I am making.)

I’ll stop here — but there’s more, so far I’ve been focused on our marketing and selling subsystems.  Now imagine adding the customer buying and community subsystems into the mix.  I’ll talk about these in the next blog post.  I’ll leave you sitting at the edges of your seats for now.

There are a couple of things that I’d like to conclude with:

• We do have to break down these processes, developing high performance subsystems.  There is so much that can be gained by optimizing these subsystems and processes.  All the work that is being done to improve marketing effectiveness and processes is critical to our organizations.  Likewise, all the work that we do in improving sales processes, performance and effectiveness is critical.
• While we are “solving” those problems, we must be cognizant that what we do with these subsystems may not work when you look at the system as a whole.  Ultimately, we have to look at how all the pieces – parts fit together.  Does the “whole” work together to achieve the results we want?  Are we making changes to one subsystem that adversely impact another subsystem? 
• As sales and marketing professionals, we need to be thinking in “systems” terms.  We need to think how subsystems fit into the overall system and how we interlock on programs, processes, goals and objectives.

What do you think?

Stay tuned, the real challenge is still ahead!

I meet with executives everyday.  They have great knowledge about their businesses–they can cite everything about their strategies, priorities, goals, key metrics.  They study their competitors incessantly, understanding their strategies and positioning.  They study their markets, and the best study their customers.  They have deep insight about everything in their industry.

But when I talk to them, a critical issue they always bring up is, “How do we innovate?”  “How do we start thinking out of the box?”

One of the problems with innovating and thinking out of the box is that we are prisoners of our own experience.  Most of us have long experiences in our industry.  We’ve been working with our company a long time, we may have worked with one of our competitors, we may have worked with one of our customers.  We go to “our trade shows,”  we read “our trade magazines,”  we have deep knowledge about our companies, industries and markets. 

That’s part of what makes us effective as leaders and business professionals, but at the same time, it’s exactly what limits us.  Our ideas and innovations are limited by this collection of past experiences.  We “know” what works and what doesn’t work, never reconsidering ideas that were “bad” in the past.  We look at what our competitors are doing, copying them, perhaps tweaking the idea to one up them.  We turn the crank on the tried and true programs of the past, sharpening them, reshaping them—sometimes it’s just like putting lipstick on a pig.

So how do we escape this?  It’s actually pretty easy (maybe I’m giving away the secret decoder ring of consultants), we need to look outside our own industries.  We need to look in very different industries to see how they approach some of the issues that we face.  For example, a few years ago, we put the executives of one of the leading high technology (B2B) companies together with the execs of an extreme sports company.  It was an interesting picture, on one side of the conference room, a row of execs in neatly pressed khaki’s and blue shirts, on the other side, guys in board shorts, torn tee shirts, lots of body ink and interesting piercings.  Each eyed the other warily, some started looking at me thinking, “Dave, what have you gotten us into?  Who are these freaks?” 

We tee’d off the session with a few key questions about their business models, key challenges, problems, and so forth.  Gradually, they found they had a lot in common.  All were struggling to grow their businesses.  All were struggling to get new and innovative ideas.  As they started to talk over different approaches, one of the exec’s said to his peers in his company, “They are doing something really interesting and different from what everyone does in our industry, if we co-opted their ideas, if we twisted them a little here and there, they would be really new and novel for our company!”

Soon everyone was discovering something “new.”  It wasn’t “new” to the presenter, but to the others it was new and innovative–when adapted to their industry.  Each side started seeing ideas presented from a source they never would have thought about before.

Innovation doesn’t have to be brand new and revolutionary. innovation can be artful adaptations of old ideas from very different industries and sources.  Try looking outside your industry–not just to adjacent industries, but to widely separated groups.  Try looking across generations–forget Gen Y–they are so old–look at kids.  Try looking across national borders and cultures.  Look at what other people do, how they handle similar issues, look at what you can learn and adapt from them.  Share what you are doing, let them learn and adapt from you.

Innovation is simple, you just have to know where to look, how to listen, how to artfully co-opt and adapt.  Tom Peters coined the phrase, Management By Wandering Around, MBWA.  Try IBWA–Innovation By Wandering Afar.

A few years ago, I was talking to a sales manager.  He was expressing some frustration, “I’m doing my job of selling, my customers need to start doing a better job of buying!”  When you think about it, there’s actually a lot of truth to that statement — at least the “doing a better job of buying” part.

Our customers do a bad job of buying because they don’t know how to buy.  With the exception of purchasing professionals, it’s not our customers jobs to buy, they focus on doing their jobs whether it is building products, running an operation, providing IT support, whatever their function is.  They don’t know how to organize their buying effort, they don’t know how to define what they are trying to do, they don’t know how they should look at and evaluate alternatives.  Buying is something is a disruption to their normal work flow–they are already busy, often just trying to survive, now they have this new task — it takes time away from doing their normal job.  They probably recognize they need to change–they need to find a new solution, but they don’t know how to organize themselves to make a decision.  They also have to go through all that awkward stuff of managing a team, each with a different agenda, each with different views on what is needed, each with a different priority.  just coordinating the buying group, requires a lot of skill and time.

Customers worry about making a bad decision.  They are accountable to their management to do the right thing for the company.  They are held accountable for investing company funds well–they need to demonstrate their purchase creates a return for the company.  If they make a mistake, their management will be all over them, they may even lose their jobs.

Customers don’t buy very often.  In complex B2B solutions, they may purchase these once in their careers.  Think of it, a new piece of capital equipment–something that has a life of more than 5 years, a major new software system, outsourcing services, whatever.  Their lack of experience makes them apprehensive–both because of the “long life” of whatever they are buying, but they just haven’t looked at thse solutions very often.  They don’t know what’s out there, what’s good, what they should avoid.  Even if they buy more frequently, things are changing so quickly, it’s difficult for them to keep up.  Think of something that has become commoditized like PC’s.  The product life cycle of a PC is probably around 3-6 months.  So if I looked at PC’s last year, there have been 2-4 generations of new PC’s since then.  Everything that I knew about buying them a year ago has changed.

Procurement professionals help.  Their job is buying, they keep up with the products they are responsible for.  But it’s still difficult for them.  They aren’t making purchasing decisions on their own.  They are acting on behalf of people within the organization.  They have to make sure they understand and are satisfying the needs of their customers.  They face the challenge of helping manage the process, expectations and align the different agendas and priorities of their customers.

Finally, buying is about change—none of us like change, it’s always so difficult, it’s often easier just to keep doing the same old thing.

It’s no wonder that customers do a bad job of buying—after all their jobs aren’t about buying.  So they need help–and that’s where great sales professionals differentiate themselves.

See the peddlers don’t recognize that customers don’t know how to buy.  They blindly assume the customer is expert at this, they never ask questions to determine if they do know how to buy.  All they do is pitch their products hoping to dazzle the customer with Features Advantages Benefits, ghee whiz Technology, and large doses of Charm and Personality.  Peddlers are pitching their products but not solving their customers’ problems–one of which is “How Do I Buy?”

Great sales professionals recognize their job is to help their customers solve their problems–both operating their businesses more effectively and efficiently and addressing new opportunities.  Great sellers also recognize that part of solving customers’ problems is helping them understand how to buy–they work with the customer in facilitating their buying process.  They realize, that by helping their buyers buy, they are creating great value for their customers.

Are you helping your customers do a better job of buying?

(As a side note, my friend Sharon Drew Morgen worries about Buying Facilitation (TM) a lot.  I highly recommend looking at her site, and devouring her books and matierials.)

I’m constantly about how few sales people really understand what their customers are buying.  They know what they are selling, but they can’t explain what they are selling it for—that is why the customer is considering buying the solution and the value it creates for them.

There are a few fundamental questions the sales person must be able to answer if they want to present their offerings in a way that is compelling and connects with customers:

1. How does it help them grow their business?  That is how will they increase revenues/sales, how will it help them enter new markets, regions or acquire new customers?
2. How will it help them increase their profitability?  Growing revenues or cutting expenses or both increase profitability, if the sales person can’t demonstrate this, then there is no justification for the solution–why should the customer buy it, how will they get their management to approve something that has no business justification?
3. How will it help them increase the satisfaction of their customers?  Creating satisfied customers helps grow the business.  Creating satisfied customers helps retain and grow current customers and acquire new customers.
4. How does it help the customer increase the quality of their products or services?  Increased quality drives increased satisfaction, increased efficiency and effectiveness.  These all contribute the the other items.
5. How does it help the customer become more effective and/or more efficient?  Effectiveness has to do with doing the right things, efficiency has to do with doing them in as short a time/expense as possible.  These contribute to increasing productivity and driving revenue growth or expense reduction.
6. What may impair the customer’s ability to implement the solution, take ownership, assure internal alignment, and manage all the change issues internally?  Sales is about change management, while we might have the most compelling solutions from a business justification point of view, if we can’t help our customers understand and manage the change issues, both we and they will be unsuccessful.
7. Why is this important to your customers (both the enterprise and individuals) now?

These issues are important, at whatever level you are selling.  The mistake many sales people make is they think, “my product is only a small component in the overall scheme of things that my customer is facing.”  However, the best sales people think in terms of “for the lack of a horseshoe, a kingdom was lost.”  Just think, a small part or design flaw in the Toyota gas pedal is contributing to the loss of $100′s of millions in sales, as well as reputation.  Everything we sell won’t have that kind of impact on our customers, but everything contributes in some, even small way, to the attainment of the customer’s business objectives.  Understanding this, communicating it to the customer–who often may not have a clear idea themselves about their contribution to the business–will set you apart from your competitors and help you create a tight, value based relationship with your customers.

The process of being able to answer these questions requires you to understand your customers’ businesses, markets, customers, opportunities, strategies and priorities at a deep level.  The process of being able to answer these questions requires you to engage your customers in a deep discussion about what they are trying to achieve.

You may not be able to answer all these questions, but the more you can answer, improves your competitiveness and the value you bring to your customers.  If you can’t answer any of these, then you are not creating value for your customer, you are just a “live” product catalog.

Have I missed any?

As sales consultative sales professionals, we focus on solving our customers’ problems.  We qualify customers by finding those with problems they want to solve, focus on identifying their pain and needs, then propose how our solution addresses those better than any others.  And our competitors seek to do the same.

But we have a much greater opportunity to create value and develop deeper relationships with our customers.  It’s through helping them discover opportunities—things that can make them more efficient or effective, things that improve their ability to serve their customers, things that help them grow and expand.  Our customers have goals and visions for the future–both as enterprises and individuals.  Often, the momentum of day to day activities blinds them.  They focus so much on fighting the alligators, they forget they really wanted to drain the swamp—or they think that fighting alligators is their purpose for existing.

Great sales people are students of their customers’ businesses and industries.  Great sales people are great business people.  They ask themselves the question, “If I were running this business, what would I do to improve and grow it?”  They go to their customers with ideas and possibilities–not frivolous, but well thought out with specific recommendations of how to get from here to there.  They keep them simple, they show how they can fit into the customer’s current priorities and goals.  Great sales people come with ideas that enable the customer “fight the alligators and drain the swamp.”  Or they show the customer how addressing the new opportunity eliminates the current problems that are distracting them.

Great sales people help their customers understand what they don’t know.

Sales people have an advantage over their customers–they don’t have to be consumed by day to day survival.  They can take the time to look at their customers’ futures, helping them to discover new opportunities.

Yes, our job is helping our customers solve their problems, but it is also helping them realize their dreams!

Next week, June 14-18, Microsoft and Focus.com are sponsoring an exciting event:  Dynamic Business Week!  It’s a virtual conference, bringing thousands of business professionals together to talk about issues critical to growth, productivity and success.

The conference will be an important opportunity to understand Social Customer Relationship Management and the potential it can bring in helping customers, sellers, and marketers connect.  The conference has an outstanding list of speakers, including:  Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Solutions Division, Paul Greenburg, Scott Albro-of Focus.com, Kirill Tatarinov, Mike Ehrenberg, Joshua Greenbaum, Mike Gannotti, Marty Collins, Ardath Albee (one of my favorites), Myra Golden and Bill Patterson.

I’m flattered to be joining this group–on Tuesday, June 15, I will be presenting my thoughts on High Performance Sales and the Top 10 Things Sales Managers Must Worry About.  Following the presentation, I’ll be joining 1000′s of others in an online discussion of creating the highest levels of performance in sales organizations.

To warm you up, I’ve posted a couple of briefs at Focus.com:  How Do We Find The Time To Coach Our Sales People? and High Performance Sales Driven By High Performing Sales Managers.  Make sure you read them—I’ll be testing you;-)

There will be all sorts of other events, presentations, and opportunities to network with great people from around the world.  Make sure you reserve time on your calendar to participate and contribute to the discussion.

This is a don’t miss event for any sales, marketing, and business professional interested in exploring how to outSell and outPerform their competition.  Make sure you visit the site everyday:  Dynamic Business Week.

Sales is about change–if we are successful with our customers, we get them to change, buying our products and services.  But if sales is about change, why are so many sales people resistant to changing how they sell.

In too many conversations, I see people and organizations stuck doing things the same way they have always done them.  Without a doubt, people are working harder and much longer hours, but doing the same old things longer and faster won’t change the circumstance.  In truth, the tried and true approaches we used in the past don’t work.  It’s not the economy that’s creating this, so waiting it out won’t work.  The world of professional selling has changed profoundly.  The way our customers buy and the ways we engage our customers has changed profoundly.  Customers have different and higher expectations than ever before.  Customers are expecting and demanding their suppliers work with them in different ways.

Top sales professionals have a great opportunity.  Rather than being dragged kicking and screaming into the new world of buying, top sales professionals have the opportunity to offer real leadership.  It starts with a commitment to upsetting the status quo—in what each sales professional does individually and in the way our sales organizations work with customers.  We must challenge everything we have done in the past–much is still appropriate, but needs to be adapted to our new world.  Much needs to change, leveraging new technologies, addressing new opportunities that enable us to better engage customers, increasing our effectiveness and productivity.  We need to re-engineer our organizations, our processes, our workflow.  We need to think critically about how we create value for our customers.

But this is not sales job alone.  We need to engage our organizations in challenging the status quo.  Marketing needs to closely align with sales in looking at new ways of acquiring customers, nurturing them and engaging them in discussions about their businesses.  Product development needs to engage the customers in different ways, making them part of the definition of products and services that create real value for the customer.  Customer service will be different, as well.  The entire organization needs to look at new relationships with customers, possibly deeper, richer, and with more parts of both the customers’ and our organizations.

I’ve often thought of sales as the leaders within their companies.  Sales has the opportunity to provide real leadership, with their customers and organizations.  Are youcommitted to upsetting the status quo? 

Social media is changing the way our customers buy and the way in which we engage our customers.  Before customers even see us for the first time, they have a great deal of information—not necessarily knowledge—about our company, our products, and our competition.  I am often asked, “How should sales professionals be engaging in social media?”

The short answer is, I’m not sure—but every sales person must be gaining familiarity and leveraging social media.  Social media and social selling is changing everything we do, the pace varies by industry, but every sales person must get familiar with how the world of engaging customers is changing.

The most powerful way sales people can be using social media is to listen—listen to the market, listen to customers, listen to competition, even listen to their own company.  Tools like Twitter, Blogs, even company sites on Facebook and LinkedIn can give the sales people tremendous insight about what’s going on in their customers’ industries, in their customers’ companies, and in the industry.  They provide great insight into what people are saying about our own companies and competition.  Leveraging social media is critical for all sales people in being informed and competitive.

Sales people should leverage social media for their own personal development.  There are great resources  where sales people can learn more about business, professional selling, and things going on in their industries.  Sales people should find and subscribe to a few of their favorite blogs.  They should join some groups and participate in discussions on LinkedIn.    They should start commenting both in LinkedIn, on Twitter, and in some of their favorite blogs.

I’m always asked the question, should sales people be writing blogs?  My answer is, “It depends—but probably not.”  I know this sounds wrong, and I’ll probably change my position over time.  I believe companies need to have strong blog presence, positioning themselves and their solutions, engaging customers in new conversations.  The issue is, should sales people be doing that?  With a few exceptions, I don’t think it’s a great use of sales people’s time.  I also don’t believe most sales people are trained to be able to do this as effectively as others in the organization.  Finally, I think sales time is best spent in engaging customers in specific situations relevant to their business.

Finally, sales people need to be cautious.  Social media will absorb as much of your time as you let it.  You can become consumed with it, not spending time focusing on specific opportunities with customers.  Sales professionals don’t let the time the spend with social media become an excuse for failing to produce results.

What do you think?  How does social media impact sales professionals?  How should sales people be leveraging social media?

Mother’s Day seems appropriate for a very off topic post.  Blogging gives me great joy.  It’s therapeutic, I get to pontificate about all sorts of things.  When I’m on, I get to learn from my readers, whose comments often provide much more insight than my posts.

However recently, unbeknownst to me, I learned that my parents were great fans of my blog, reading it regularly.  I know they knew I blogged, but I had never told them the URL, or anything about how to find it.  Somehow, they navigated Google, found the blog, navigated the complexities of RSS feeds, discovered readers and now subscribe and regularly read the blog.

I first learned this when I got an email from my mom.  She commented on some post, wanting to express her opinion about the topic.  Somehow, she was a little embarrassed about commenting on the blog post itself, she said, “I didn’t think you would want my comment to be seen by everyone.  I also didn’t think it was appropriate for me to end my comment with ‘I’m so proud of my little boy!’”

Mom still won’t comment directly on the blog, but she sends me regular emails with her view on many of the topics I write about.  While I value everyone’s comments, hers I treasure.  Frankly, I kind of like her emailing comments, it’s my private conversation.  It is so rewarding to me to know they read and like the blog.

I’m amazed with my parents.  They struggle with computers and technology, but they are constantly learning.  They are part of the Facebook generation, friends with all the grandkids, and many other people.  They read every imaginable news feed, many blogs and keep current with things.  My mom even texts on her mobile phone.

However, sometimes we have amusing moments—there are some generational gaps.  A few posts ago, I lamented about the problems with my router.  A few days ago, I got home and found a package from my Dad.  It was his neatly boxed, Craftsman Router—the woodworking kind, with his collection of sharpened bits.  He put a note in the box—“Saw you were struggling with your router.  Borrow mine for as long as you need it!”  We had a great laugh—“Dad, it’s not that kind of router.”

We deal with generations everyday—Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y.  Too often, we focus on the differences.  Some generations proudly saying they are the best, others saying the others just don’t get it.  We have so much to learn from each other.  We need to be open, listen, learn, experiment.

My parents experiment, they are learning and adopting the tools of the younger generations.  They are active in social media, leveraging the web.  I am so proud of them and what they teach me.

The one thing they are struggling with is, they think Twittering is for the birds.  Frankly, I don’t know if that is an informed opinion or whether we have another one of those generational light moments.