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Community Activists have Fun
Saul Alinsky was right. I’ll tell you about what in a minute. First you need to understand a little about Saul. From the 30’s through the 60’s, he was a community activist and organizer. If you were part of a community that felt powerless, you could learn from Saul Alinsky about making your voice heard. One of his core beliefs was that mankind is inherently wise. As he said in his Rules for Radicals, “In the end he has one conviction—a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions. The alternative to this would be rule by the elite.” Enough said about Saul. Read his book and you will understand the man. By the way, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote her senior collegiate thesis on Mr. Alinsky.
One of the tactics Saul discussed in the book is the power of enjoyment. He once suggested that a community organization feed 100 people as many baked beans as they could eat and then send them to a symphony orchestra recital. While the concert may not be fun, discussion of the tactic certainly got laughs. His rules still seem to matter today. A community of people near the Poudre River joined in a fun activity to try to save the river. I cannot do justice to their activities, so I will just urge you to follow the link to the story of the their efforts to save it. See their efforts here.
Text Message Relationships
I came across a blog entry the other day that really piqued my interest in virtually personal sales. Tammy Erickson, was blogging about some possibilities. As she writes, “Text messaging is in some ways the early vanguard of this move toward the use of technology for nearly-constant coordination. . . .If you watch Gen Y’s on a typical weekend night, you’ll see that they rarely plan. Instead, they coordinate, largely through text messaging.”
In this paradigm, text messaging becomes a virtual face-to-face conversation that can lead to a real one. A text message leads to a phone conversation that leads to a video which leads to a group conversation. All the while, texting becomes a glue that keeps the relationship bonded, coordinated, and blossoming. Text messaging will probably never build the sort of relationship that lets you have a life long customer. However, it can open up possibilities that you’ve not had before. Someone sees a flyer of yours, meets you at an exposition, or gets a business card. They call you for more information. You say, “Hold on, I’ll text you the web address with all the details.” As Tammy said, “Don’t be too surprised if a Y uses texting to hone in on the coordinates of the upcoming meeting [or] the missing report.”
Depositing Goodwill
I love it when I can see that business leaders are reading some of the same stuff that I do and they are finding ways to live the principles. Here’s a great example.
Stephen Covey first wrote about an emotional bank account in 1989 in his book about the Seven Habits. Basically, we build up our trust deposits in a relationship like bank deposits. They are in our account until we do something stupid and need to make a withdrawal. Like a bank account, being overdrawn can be an expensive proposition. Think about those businesses that you love to hate. You will do anything you can to avoid doing business with them; you will even tell others not to do business with them.
Now imagine that you are the CEO of JetBlue, David Neeleman, and the February weather has just created your worst customer service nightmare. You apologized as often and as publicly as you can; you provided refunds and credits, and you do everything you can to make things right and prevent it from happening again. Perhaps most importantly, you and JetBlue have over seven years of good customer care going for it. JetBlue drew goodwill out of the trust bank in enormous quantities and was working as hard as they could to put it back in. Initial indications through blogs and polls show that they are once again working on the right side of the deposit equation.
Remember where this started—leaders living principles that I read about? Here is what Neeleman had to say about it in a recent Fast Company article. “If you run a crap company to begin with, you have no money in the emotional bank.” What a great Brass Ring! Do the best job you can of taking care of your customers because someday you will need some of it back.
Perseverence Counts
I was listening to an interview show with four comedians the other day and Jerry Seinfeld was asked how many jokes you had to write to get a good one. Jerry’s answer was that only one out of ten jokes was any good, and he was probably overestimating his success rate. Just prior to watching the show, I read an article about Sir James Dyson, who made 5, 126 wrong prototypes of a vacuum cleaner before he created the one that is the best-selling vacuum in America.
I’m not sure what it is about stick-to-it-ness, but I think that self-employed people have more perseverance than others. Entrepreneurs have to get it right—or at least better—to survive. Ask any entrepreneur about their core success rate and they will know it.
How often can you up sell?
How many cold calls to get a conversation?
How many conversations to get a sale?
How many sales become repeat business?
Entrepreneurs have a drive for success. Sure, it’s related to making money, but there is much more to it than that. Entrepreneurs are willing to fail, knowing that each failure lets them get closer to the mark with their next effort. Each failure improves their success rate because they don’t fail the same way again.