BOOK
Flirting with the Uninterested
Innovating in a “Sold, Not Bought” Category
What if you’re solving the wrong problem?
Your customers aren’t interested. Your salespeople are frustrated. Your competitors keep lowering their prices.
So you redesign the product. Adjust the pricing. Retrain the sales team. But what if none of those things addresses the real problem?
In Flirting with the Uninterested, Maria Ferrante-Schepis and Mike Maddock challenge leaders to look beyond the symptoms and ask a more fundamental question: Have we stopped understanding the people we’re trying to serve?
By Maria Ferrante-Schepis and G. Michael Maddock
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Get outside your jar
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Make customers want what you sell
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Make the complicated understandable
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Innovate around real unmet needs.
You can’t read the label when you’re sitting inside the jar.
The longer you’ve worked in an industry, the more assumptions you’ve absorbed about how things work.
Consider Kodak. The company understood what made a technically superior photograph. But when Fuji introduced film that produced brighter, more colorful pictures, customers responded enthusiastically. Kodak’s expertise wasn’t the problem. Its assumptions about what customers valued were.
“
A smart, provocative look at why so many good products struggle to gain traction—and what it really takes to create relevance with customers.”
— Brian Anderson
Then Editor-in-Chief, Life Insurance Selling
THE BIGGER IDEA
From industry assumptions to leadership blind spots.
The principles in Flirting with the Uninterested laid the groundwork for Mike’s continued focus on the power of outside perspectives, diverse thinking, and better questions—ideas that now drive his work with leaders and advisory boards.
MORE FROM MIKE
Explore more of Mike’s books.
Discover a practical, real-world approach to innovation, leadership, and seeing opportunities others miss.