Doug Davidoff
Early last year (2017) I had the privilege to participate in a series of interviews that HubSpot Academy professor Kyle Jepson was conducting to create what is now a certification course on Sales Enablement. If you haven’t seen the courses, I highly encourage you to do so. It’s probably HubSpot’s best program (and I’m not saying that just because I’m featured).
As with all interviews like this, some of the material gets used and a lot doesn’t. One of the conversations I had with Kyle that was used in the training was around a concept I call investment mindset vs. income mindset. I talk about this concept a lot with the clients we work with (it’s actually a key component of our ideal client profile). I haven’t had the opportunity to share these thoughts with the public and I thought this segment did a great job of highlighting what investment mindset is, and more importantly, why it matters.
Enjoy the video (you’ll see a transcription below).
What Are “Investment Mindset” Companies?
And a lot of crazy shit. Well, they're doing sales enablement. You know, they're investing in data and I hate to say this because it can sound like a buzzword, but they're not looking at it as sales and marketing. They're looking at it as “revenue generation” or “demand generation.”
So, they're looking at things holistically. Well, you know what's interesting in investment mindset companies is their goal is to be less wrong tomorrow than they are today. Income oriented or income mindset companies, their goal is to be right.
And so, what ends up happening is they (income mindset companies) wait because they wait to be right. Investment mindset companies are investing in artificial intelligence, they're doing live chat going, “I don't think anyone really uses it.” Actually, we just put live chat on our site. (Note: this recording was done one year ago.) We're beginning to test some things out and no one has done anything yet. And we're like OK cool. Right? We're learning here, we're figuring some things out. And you know what I might find out a year from now? No point in that.
It's interesting when you asked that question...It's not that that investment mindset companies are clairvoyant. It's that they're willing to try stuff a lot more easily than income mindset companies are.
I can't help but think of this story. I was horrible in science when I was in school. I literally failed chemistry my junior year in college and had to retake it my senior year. And I'm proud to say I got Ds to be able to graduate. All right. I talk about science all the time. I talk about brain chemistry. I talk about biology and people come up to me and are like “Doug, how, when did you find out that you liked science.”
What I realized was science was taught to me all wrong in high school and in college because when I did science in high school and college I was supposed to recreate experiments and I was supposed to, you know, put this together with this and get that. Right?
It wasn't until I was an adult that I learned that the scientific method was based on having a theory. Try it out and if you're right or you're wrong, you're equally successful, because the questions not, “we’re you right or wrong,” the question is “what did you learn?”
That's what I would say. What investment mindset companies are doing today that income mindset companies are not. Income mindset companies are judging progress by “are they right and wrong?” Investment mindset companies are judging things by “what did we learn?” And the company that is judging by what we learn is going to kick the ass of the company tht judges by being right.
