Welcome to the first of an ongoing series of Voodoo Shots- these are short focused episodes on specific topics within the Business Voodoo series.

In this ‘shot’ we will focus on why it really matters to get ahead of the curve. More than a practical chapter, this episode will hopefully act as an insight into what lies at the foundation of the Business Voodoo philosophy.

This is also the first of a number of ‘inspirational’ pieces that may help you in creating an opportunity to stand out in an increasingly crowded, noisy and distracting world.

To start off with, let’s focus on a challenge we all face: Our struggle with information overload.

Today, you have access to more information that we could possibly have thought possible only two decades ago. Even your phone allows you to retrieve more information than the average nations’s intelligence could in the 1990’s.

This has serious implications on the way we do business because all the distraction it brings often causes ‘analysis by paralysis’ - meaning that this overload of information adds many distractions to the business process. Our attention span is declining in reverse proportion to the increasingly large amount of content that is being created.

At first sight this seems like a negative evolution but if you think about it, it also brings a big opportunity for those who are willing to think ahead when it comes to providing a solution. Let me explain what I mean by focusing on how we can apply this for business development:

Not so long ago, customers mostly relied on vendors to access the needed information about products and services. This meant that sell side was also the source of information. Vendors would supply the needed information to prospects who in turn would buy the product or service from those vendors.

Of course it would be perfectly possible to obtain 3^rd party opinions but that would also require an additional effort because it involved reaching out to members of a network on an individual basis.

For example, when I was in the fund management industry back in the late 1990s, it was very easy to get meetings with prospective investors because we would educate them about investment opportunities in exotic categories such as emerging markets or cutting edge technologies to which they had practically no access on their own. The sales prices was quite straightforward: if we made a good case for investing, chances were high that we’d get to manage their investments for them.

I even remember how it was frowned upon when we’d go onto the internet during working hours. The internet wasn’t a really seen as a business tool back then, we’d even have a designated shared computer with an internet access back in those days…

Today things are very different. We all have access to an enormous stock of information at the push of keystroke. Knowledge has become a commodity, and it increasingly exists in abundance. We are bombarded with emails, tweets, social media updates, a continuous swarm of headlines that are deliberately crafted to get our attention.

What this means is that the true value proposition for a vendor has shifted from being a source to being a guide.

In other words, today’s true added value to prospects and customers comes in the form of helping them make sense out of all noisy and confusing distraction.

This means that we need to find a way to earn thought leadership and the level of trust that will make us stand out from the crowd or become that voice that can be heard above all the noise.

The way to achieve is to figure out a way to consistently show up with a valuable message that help the prospect or customer make sense of there challenges and helps them arrive at a solution.

As you can see on the bar chart, by consistently supplying useful knowledge, our relationships with prospects can compound into relationships of trust.

So, by supplying insights that help others get better at dealing with their challenges, we eventually earn their business.

I know this is nothing new and the principle in itself is the same as it always was in business development, but the method of supplying this knowledge to our customers needs an upgrade. We not only need to figure out how to be useful with our insights, but we must also consider new ways of delivering our information to our customers so that it can easily be consumed in a world of limited attention span.

Furthermore, we must also figure out how to use the power of all the hyper-connectivity to our advantage by creating digital assets - or content - that is not only very consumable but also highly shareable so it can do much of the selling for us.

Share-ability is also very important because most of the time our prospects need to convince others before they can make the decision to do business with us. Digital assets that are easily transferable make this very easy and also add an additional layer of usefulness to our prospects and customers.

Think about all the times you had to go back to the customer to pitch to new people in the decision process. Can you see how these digital assets can do that for you, saving everyone time and effort in the process?

The great news is that today’s technology is extremely simple to use.

Let’s take the video above as an example. All it took me to make this content was a laptop with a camera and a presentation. I use an $90 application called ‘screenflow’ that allows me to record both myself and what is on my screen simultaneously. And if I make sure the lighting is right and put some effort into editing the video, it only takes me 20 minutes to produce this video.

Once I put it online, you and thousands and potentially even millions of others can benefit from something that took me less than half an hour to produce. Can you see the potential?

In the end, it really is all business as usual but the tools are different. In fact, they are much more powerful than ever before.

I am going to show you how to harness this power. I will teach you how to use simple technology to become more visible and effective than you imagined possible.

How does that sound?

In the next lesson, I’ll tell you more about how getting ahead of the curve is much easier than you think - especially if you adopt a new mindset that will also make you ‘Futureproof’…

Thanks very much for your attention!