Category Archives: Marketing

The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

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TO SELL IS HUMAN

WHY THE OLD RULES OF SELLING DON’T APPLY

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, author Daniel Pink notes in his new book To Sell Is Human, 1 out of every 10 Americans works in sales. Is that less than before? Certainly. But have the Internet and online shopping brought the sales function to the precipice of extinction, as so many have predicted? Not quite, Pink writes. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics data (replicated by corresponding statistics in other developed countries) vastly understates the amount of “selling” going on when we consider what selling, according to Pink, really entails: “persuading, influencing and convincing others.”

This is what he calls “non-sales selling.” Most people, Pink explains, are involved in non-sales selling, no matter what their profession. Examples cited by Pink include physicians who sell patients on a remedy, lawyers who sell juries on a verdict, teachers who sell students on the value of paying attention in class, entrepreneurs selling to funders, writers selling to producers and coaches cajoling players to play their best. In fact, it’s no longer completely accurate to see producing and consuming as the two most important economic activities, Pink writes. “Today, much of what we do also seems to involve moving,” he explains. “That is, we’re moving other people to part with resources — whether something tangible like cash or intangible like effort or attention — so that we both get what we want.”

Why Sales Is So Important

Why are so many people devoting their valuable time to selling when the practice is allegedly in decline? Pink offers three reasons:

  1. Entrepreneurship. The past few years (thanks in great part and a bit ironically to the Internet) have seen the rise of small entrepreneurship — small shops or one- or two-person enterprises selling, as Pink writes, “services, creativity and expertise.” For these small-business owners and micro-entrepreneurs, there is no dedicated sales force to bring in the customers; they are their own sales forces.
  2. Elasticity. Once upon a time, Pink writes, “if you were an accountant, you did accounting.” However, intense competition and economic conditions have forced organizations to go “flat” — or at least flatter. As a result, functions are no longer rigidly separated as in the past. Job descriptions are broader and usually involve some kind of selling.
  3. Ed-Med. Education and health are among the fastest-growing industries, and as the examples of the teachers and physicians above demonstrate, much of education- and health-related work involves non-sales selling. “Of course,” Pink notes with characteristic humor, “teaching and healing aren’t the same as selling electrostatic carpet sweepers. The outcomes are different. A healthy and educated population is a public good, something that is valuable in its own right and from which we all benefit. A new carpet sweeper or gleaming Winnebago, not so much.”

The New ABCs

When selling is mostly “moving” people, the old rules of selling no longer apply. After making his case for the predominance of non-sales selling in our lives, Pink outlines the different strategies for 21st-century selling. He begins, in the second section of his book, by showing how the traditional mantra of selling, “Always Be Closing,” has been replaced by a new set of ABCs: Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity. Attunement is to be in harmony with those around you — which is why, Pink writes, extraverts are not the best salespeople. They don’t take the time to become attuned. (Introverts aren’t necessarily the best, either, Pink notes.) Buoyancy is knowing how to always be “afloat” in a difficult world of constant rejection, thanks to one’s resilience and optimism. Clarity, in Pink’s approach, refers to the art of problem finding — different from the traditional emphasis on problem solving. Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity are the attributes of the new successful salesperson. In the final section of the book, Pink outlines the three core abilities — knowing how to pitch, how to improvise and how to serve — required to succeed.

Pink, a best-selling author whose books include Drive and A Whole New Mind, has once again expanded his readers’ perspectives on how the world really works, with insight and humor bolstered by solid research.

Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t

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THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE

NO NOISE WITH THIS BUZZWORTHY BOOK

Nate Silver, the creator of the New York Times political blog FiveThirtyEight.com, is probably America’s most well-known statistician, especially after his assertion that a 300-plus electoral college vote victory for Barack Obama was highly probable proved correct. In The Signal and the Noise, Silver explores a wide variety of areas — including electoral politics, sports, weather, terrorism, war and gambling — in which prediction plays a major role. He examines some of the major failures, from Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis to a whole series of failed earthquake forecasts, to try to understand what went wrong and what can be learned for the future. The problem is not the lack of data — today there is an almost endless supply of information on any topic or question. Instead, the problem is learning how to interpret the information, paying attention to the right information and recognizing the rest as just distraction — in other words, recognizing the difference between a predictive signal and the distracting noise.

Colossal Misinterpretation

Silver begins by examining one of the most colossal errors in prediction in recent times: the world financial crisis that no one predicted. As Silver explains, the signals were present, but were dismissed. As analysts and decision-makers watched continuously rising house prices, they failed to see the potential for a bubble; as they watched the explosion of mortgage-backed securities, they failed to understand the risk of those securities; as they started to consider the potential of a housing crisis, they failed to see that such a crisis could trigger a global financial crisis; and as they dealt with the financial crisis, they failed to predict the long-term impact.

Be Foxy

For Silver, the best forecasters are going to be “foxes,” rather than “hedgehogs.” The metaphor comes from Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Hedgehogs believe in big governing ideas from which everything flows, Silver writes. Foxes, on the other hand, believe in little ideas and multiple approaches. Hedgehogs are specialized, stubborn and confident. Foxes are multidisciplinary, self-critical and cautious. The principles of Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog reflect his “foxy” approach to forecasting. Instead of confidently making one specific forecast and sticking to it, especially if it’s different from what everyone else is saying, Silver offers a range of probable outcomes and is willing to change the predictions in light of new information.

The Human Factor

Despite his mastery of data, Silver notes that the human factor is equally important in making the right predictions. “What is it, exactly, that humans can do better than computers that can crunch numbers at 77 teraFLOPS?” Silver asks, as he considers two meteorologists staring at every screen on the forecasting floor of the National Weather Service headquarters. The answer: “They can see.”

Of course, they can also misinterpret what they see. But Silver is hopeful for the potential of predictions as long as those making the predictions, he writes, adhere to the principles of an 18th century English minister called Thomas Bayes. In a chapter titled “Less and Less and Less Wrong,” Silver describes the probabilistic theory of Bayes, in which someone makes a prediction, looks at the new evidence, confirms or changes the prediction, looks at the new evidence, confirms or changes the prediction, each time getting closer to making the correct prediction. As Silver explains, Bayes taught us that we learn about the universe “through approximation, getting closer and closer to the truth as we gather more evidence.” Bayes theorem implies that “we must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty,” he writes. “We must think more carefully to the assumptions and beliefs that we bring to a problem.” As Silver demonstrates in detail in such diverse areas as sports, global warming, and terrorism, the more predictions are based on a Bayesian approach, the more likely they are to come true.

The Signal and the Noise is a sprawling, dense book that is as filled with stories and personalities as it is with data. This book will fascinate those who care about what is happening in the world — or what may happen.

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Selling No Longer Works

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“Today, we live in a postselling and postpushing world. As people grow more aware of manipulative tactics, their guard goes up. The Internet, television advertising, and wall-to-wall marketing have made us cynical about deceptive tricks and hard-sell approaches.”

This is the contention of Mark Goulston and John Ullmen in their new book Real Influence. Goulston and Ullmen provide a different way – instead of trying to manipulate people to do what we want them to, we connect with them in a way that influences them to want to work with us.

The authors have developed a four-step method of connecting and influencing:

  1. Go for great outcomes – going beyond where people want to be to showing them where they could be.
  2. Listen past your blind spot – you need to have a willingness to learn, an open mind, and sometimes the insight to discover that you’re wrong.
  3. Engage them in their there – it’s about “getting” your audience, not using “gotcha” techniques to manipulate them into compliance.
  4. When you’ve done enough…do more – it’s about committing to make their great outcomes happen, both now and in the future.

Perhaps you’ve run into these postselling walls with those that you’re trying to influence. If so, then why not join us on January 10th to hear a presentation of this new influence model with Goulston and Ullmen. They will explain the model in more detail, and give real life examples of those who have made it work. You can also ask your questions during this live webinar.

Are You Making Things Happen or Just Making Noise?

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THE IMPACT EQUATION

AN EQUATION FOR SOCIAL MEDIA SUCCESS

Bloggers Chris Brogan and Julien Smith burst onto the publishing scene in 2009 with their social media marketing best-seller Trust Agents. They return with a new book, The Impact Equation, which delves deeper into how to be heard and noticed in an age when everyone is connected.

Brogan and Smith know their subject. As the authors explain: “Anyone can write a blog post, but not everyone can get it liked 40,000 times on Facebook and not everyone can get 75,000 blog subscribers. We’ve done these things, but it isn’t because we’re special. It’s because we tried and failed… We tried again and again, and now we have an idea how to get from point A to point B faster because of it.”

How to CREATE

The authors’ secret to getting from Point A to Point B is encapsulated in the equation:

Impact = C x (R + E + A + T + E)

The “C” stands for Contrast, which is another way of saying positioning or differentiation. A successful contrast, according to the authors, offers both similarity and a noticeable difference.

The “R” stands for Reach, that is, how many people you connect with in as many channels as possible. At the heart of reach is your platform, which is basically, the authors write, “a combination of all the tools you use to reach others.”

The “E” stands for Exposure. This is a tricky area: Too much exposure and you just become more spam. The authors offer several strategies for building your exposure, including: start with like-minded people before trying to raise awareness; tell stories that make the buyer a hero; and help others first.

The “A” stands for Articulation. For the authors, the key with this attribute is to use small words and connect the dots.

The “T” stands for Trust. A prerequisite to successful impact is understanding why we trust others. Credibility, reliability and self-interest are the key elements that generate trust.

Finally, the “E” stands for Echo, which, the authors write, is the “feeling of connection you give your reader, visitor, or participant.” The best way to create this feeling of connection is to find common experiences and use these experiences to show people that you understand them.

Guiding Principles

The Impact Equation is divided into four sections that give a guiding set of principles for moving forward with your high-impact initiatives. First, begin with your goals, exactly what you are trying to accomplish. The next set of principles is built around the concept of ideas, and covers the Contrast and Articulation attributes. As mentioned above, platform, the next category of principles, is a key component of successful social media Reach and Exposure, while the attributes of Trust and Echo are grouped under network.

Every hour of every day around the world, people are striving to connect with each other. Most of them are no more than grains of sand on the beach, unnoticed by others. The Impact Equation offers solid advice from two veterans of the social media arena on how to break through.

How the Gilt Groupe Got Its Shine

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BY INVITATION ONLY

There is an old maxim that friends should not do business together since it invariably ruins the friendship. The Information Age has disproven this notion as best friends and college roommates have launched enterprises that eventually become billion-dollar companies (Microsoft and Google are two notorious examples). Perhaps one of the most engaging stories of friendship turned into entrepreneurial success is told in By Invitation Only by Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson. The relationship between Harvard Business School graduates Maybank and Wilson is so tight that the pair is known as A&A. However, By Invitation Only is more than a story of friendship, it is a story of how two smart young women leveraged their experience, intelligence, contacts, complementary personalities, careers, skills, and a passion for fashion into an innovative online enterprise called Gilt Groupe.

The Core Idea

The Gilt Groupe — co-founded by Maybank, Wilson, engineers Mike Bryzek and Phong Nguyen, and chairman and veteran online entrepreneur Kevin Ryan — is based on the idea of the “sample sale,” in which a very select group of customers is invited to buy (during a very small window of time) luxury brands at discount prices. “To savvy, fashion-conscious New Yorkers, a Louis Vuitton or Hermès sample sale was a drop-everything-and-run proposition,” the authors write. “Once there, you basked not only in the bargains, but in being part of (and often trampled by) an elite, stylish, in-the-know crowd.”

Gilt essentially brought sample sales to the Internet. The idea began with Ryan, whose French wife discovered a French “luxury private sale” Web site. Through a recruiter, Ryan was put in contact with Wilson, who had followed Harvard Business School with stints at Louis Vuitton and Bulgari. Uneasy with the idea of an Internet business, Wilson suggested her best friend Maybank instead.

Maybank joined Ryan but eventually realized that Gilt needed a high fashion insider with the right contacts and personality to lure the right high-end brands to the site — a job description perfect for her best friend, Wilson.

How to Network and Other Lessons

By Invitation Only describes the successful entrepreneurial journey of Gilt, revealing to readers the exhilaration and terror that launching, growing and managing a start-up inevitably brings. More than just telling a story, however, Maybank and Wilson want to help readers succeed in the way that they have succeeded, and therefore offer specific advice, often in the form of boxed checklists, on moving from an idea to a profitable enterprise. Extensive networking, for example, was a key factor in the successful launch of the site. In a chapter entitled “Networking to a Launch,” the authors offer a checklist that explains the rules for growing and maintaining your network. Another chapter describes how the co-founders laid the foundation for their viral business model. This chapter includes a checklist that enables readers, through a series of questions, to evaluate whether their business has the potential to be viral.

At the heart of the book, however, is the continuing friendship and collaboration (in that order) of Maybank and Wilson. The ultra-organized and cautious Wilson and the spontaneous, risk-taking Maybank complement each other perfectly. In an era in which company founders can end up on opposite sides of a courtroom, the story of the partnership described in By Invitation Only should be a primer for any friends considering going into business together.