You certainly know who your top customers are from YOUR perspective – the ones who account for most of your revenues and most of your profits.
But do you know how many of them consider YOU to be their most important relationship? How many of them love you best of all?
The first question is easy to answer, the second one is much more important.
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On my daily commute to work, I walk from to and from the train station. It’s not that far – about a half a mile – and I feel lucky not to have to step in a car every day. Many people, though, drive to the train, even a few who live right near me.
A few Fridays ago, a guy who I know a bit (a wave, a nod, pleasantries exchanged every now and again) was driving home from the train. I was in a rush to get home to see my kids, and at that moment on a hot day, “hey do you want a ride?” would have been a welcome overture. He didn’t offer, and while he was driving off I got to thinking about the distance between us, the oh-so-sacrosanct space of aloneness that we create when driving our cars, when sitting in front of our computers, when shopping online, when plopped in front of our HDTVs, and how through all the progress we’ve made, we’ve traded in the crush and human connection of the sawdust-floored marketplace, of common spaces, and of all the unexpected, simple happenstance that comes from living our lives stumbling and tripping over one another.
In the late 90s I lived in Madrid, Spain, in an airy one-bedroom apartment that opened onto a quiet, bright courtyard. It was the second time I’d lived in Spain and it took this second take to unlearn my frustration at the “inefficiencies” of Spanish life: on Sundays, everything – and I mean everything – was closed except for churches, coffee shops and a few restaurants, and since the internet wasn’t yet so ubiquitous, my (now) wife and I developed a cherished ritual of going to a local coffee shop with the newspaper and spending hours wiling away the day, talking, and working on the crossword puzzle.
When we left Spain, as part of our goodbyes, we went door-to-door to the fruit shop, the butcher, the baker, and the cheese shop to say goodbye to the shopkeepers who had become part of our lives, who had advised us on dishes and taught us the words for pastries and cuts of meat and the best local cheeses. Yes, going to a shrink-wrapped supermarket is more efficient, but shopping for food wasn’t a chore when it was filled with conversation and questions about how last week’s dinner came out.
I worry that with all the efficiencies we’re creating, we’re also facilitating a habit that’s averse to basic human contact. It’s easier to smile and look away, easier to walk into your car than to offer someone a ride, easier to click and compare than get to know a salesman or a store owner or a neighbor.
The irony is that people crave genuine human connection. We’re just getting woefully out of the habit.
Just crack open the door a little for someone and you’ll see the light flood in.
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Here’s an idea pilfered (with permission) from my friend Jennifer.
It turns out that when people go to museums, they spend up to 10 times as much of their time reading the blurbs next to the artwork as they spend looking at the artwork itself.
Which might be why, when we try to describe what we do, we essentially write blurbs that are good enough (at best) to sit next to the picture…which is a shame since we’re all in the business of creating art. You know: “We aim to revolutionize the customer experience by enabling real-time interaction in a customer-centric fashion using…..” (Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz).
And yes, the nonprofit sector is the worst offender here, because the things we’re doing, the things in the picture frame, are so motivating and so real, and they inspires such a deep human connection that it’s doubly shameful that we use such wilted language to describe what we do.
So, the next time you sit down to write down what you do or to explain it to someone, start by imagining the picture that’s inside the frame, and describe what you see instead.
I promise it will be more real, less polished, and less likely to be interchangeable with the next organization up the block that seems, to all of us, to do the same thing you do. (And I bet you’ll write it in real English too!)
Go ahead, even if it’s not your job to do this stuff, imagine the picture that’s inside the frame for your organization. Describe it 6 words or less. Send your description to the CEO and to the people that really matter.
Have fun.
[NOTE: Just realized that Katya’s (Network for Good COO) blog has some great step-by-step tips about how to do this. Thanks Katya!]
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When you start out in life, just get out of school, and are out there pounding the pavement for that first job or trying to make that first sales call, more often than not you’re carrying around a mental model that says: “To pull this off, I need to get my point across effectively. I need to convince the person I’m meeting with that _________” (they should hire me; they should buy this product; they should give to my organization.) In service of this goal, you execute your plan of where the meeting is going to go, you get your points across, and you do most of the talking.
Why not? It’s what you’ve been trained to do. It’s a Quadrant 2 approach. And it often doesn’t work.
About 10 years ago, right before I headed into a job interview, my wife said to me, “Make sure you give THEM time to talk too.” Novel. In the first of the three interviews I had that day, meeting with a garrulous, extroverted Vice President, I spoke for about 5 minutes of the one hour interview. And I got the job.
Most high-achieving Type A folks need to move to the left.
And all of us need to figure out in which quadrant we are most comfortable, and to figure out how to get better at switching from one to another depending on the person we’re meeting and the relationship we’re trying to build.
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There’s a lot of advice out there for how to be a successful blogger, and most of it feels like it either should be ignored or needs to be taken for what it is – advice on how to game the system.
The reason I don’t take most of it seriously is because blogging to me doesn’t fall into some mysterious online category that has a slew of opaque rules only discernible by Web 2.0 (3.0? 4.0?) gurus with massive Twinfluence.
Instead, it’s just another way of delivering relevant, engaging content to readers.
Which is why I’m much more interested in turning to a writer for advice here.
This from the closing of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is worth printing out and pinning to the wall:
If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act – truth is always subversive.
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Everyone knows knows that if you run a startup you need an “elevator pitch,” a description of your business that’s pithy enough to capture the attention of a potential investor in the length of an elevator ride.
You know what else needs an elevator pitch? You.
You need to have a practiced, smooth, two- to three-sentence, “I’m so-and-so and this is who I am and what I do” at the ready. It takes practice, so know that you’re working on this and play with it until it is right.
To be effective, your personal elevator pitch needs to be direct, simple, energetic, enthusiastic, genuine and unapologetic. The last word – unapologetic – is the surprising one. It’s amazing how often people belie, in what they say or how they say it, that they are not proud (or feel like they’re not supposed to be proud) of who they are and what they do.
This is a shame, because I bet what you do is worth doing, and I bet the person you’re talking to believes that as well.
So, if just for this moment, keep your inner critic hidden away and pitch yourself with pride.
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(P.S. If you are a professional fundraiser this one takes on extra significance. Often fundraisers either don’t like describing themselves as “fundraisers” – so they stumble over how to describe themselves – or they do say they are “fundraisers” but then make caveats or other kinds of apologies. Since every fundraiser, as a representative of the organization, is selling themselves first, it’s doubly important to get this right.)
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When you meet someone for the first time – in a job interview, a sales meeting, wherever – it’s amazing how easily you can differentiate yourself by communicating that you are an actual, living human being.
Actual human beings aren’t just smart and articulate – they also have hopes and fears and joy and aspirations. Yet so often we keep all of this under wraps.
How you share glimpses of what really makes you tick will depend on your personality, your openness, to whom you are speaking. But giving even a glimpse of your own humanity is the dry tinder to spark genuine, personal connection.
The challenge is that you can’t go halfway. You can’t say “I’m really excited about / passionate about / committed to…” if you don’t express (in your voice, your eyes, your face, your body language) the emotions you are describing. Describing enthusiasm in a monotone; saying “I’m passionate” while you lean back, with arms crossed; claiming “my whole life I’ve dreamed of” as if you’re ordering a side of fries…this is worse than nothing.
Put another way, there’s no shortcut to being open, genuine, excited, and inspired. You have to FEEL real emotion and be comfortable sharing it (in a professional way).
It is precisely because there are no shortcuts that doing this right will set you apart.
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…and form letters, and customer service notes that sound like customer service notes and most anything that was obviously written by lawyers trying to sound like lawyers whenever it’s not 100% necessary.
Like this note I got the other day from eBay’s customer service department, which includes gems like:
“Thank you for taking the time to write back to eBay regarding your concern…”
“I would request you to check your Account Status Page where you can easily get the detailed report of the fees charged on your account…”
“If you need further assistance, please don’t hesitate to reply to this email and let us know…”
(Yeah, I can tell they’re dying to hear from me.)
Compare that to this note from Moo cards:
“I’m Little MOO – the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done and on its way to you…”
“Remember, I’m just a bit of software. So, if you have any questions regarding your order please first read our Frequently Asked Questions at: http://www.moo.com/help/ and if you’re still not sure, contact customer service (who are real people) at https://secure.moo.com/service/”
One of these companies is communicating that they care about every interaction and that personal connections matter to them. In one of these companies, the naysayers lost, the people saying “Yes, but…” failed to choke the life out of things, and doing something memorable was more important than avoiding looking silly.
No one ever loses their job because they took something great and made it unremarkable. And that’s a real shame.
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I’m still getting my feet back on the ground after spending last week at TED2010. I left the conference with a much broader sense of possibility and a renewed commitment to thinking big. Many of the talks were dazzling, and while there was no one “best” talk, the most significant one may have been Bill Gates’ talk about the need to think seriously about nuclear power as a way to address climate change.
So what makes for a great conference? While TED is unique in its ability to bring together some of the smartest, most influential, most groundbreaking thinkers, there’s still a lot that TED does as a conference that others can and should borrow.
Here’s what I would copy if I were running any other conference:
There are a million other things that make TED special, but applying just these core ideas would make almost all conferences so much better – enough so that people might come to attend the conference talks (rather than just to meet the other attendees).
And if we’re not willing to raise the bar here, we may as well just get people together and only have them talk to each other. Publish who else is going to be there and hold a massively parallel conversation, not a conference.
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I gave a speech the other day that was fine. I said what I wanted to say, made the points that I wanted to make.
But fine, I fear, is forgotten. Fine isn’t remembered when a person walks out of the room. Fine is checking the box.
I think I went wrong in the preparation: spending so much time focusing on what I wanted to say, while forgetting to think about what I wanted to happen: what I wanted the audience members to do, to feel, to remember, to repeat to the next person. And not just 5 minutes later, but the next day or the next week.
People don’t remember lists and plans. They remember the narrative, especially a narrative in which they are the central actor, and it’s clear what action they are meant to take. They also remember what they can feel: a personal connection, humor, a spark, even an image.
“What am I going to say?” or “What points am I trying to get across?” seem like the right questions to ask when drafting a speech.
But “What do I want someone to remember?” and “What do I want someone to do?” are much more important.
Next time…
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