“Gut Feeling”
February 3, 2010
We pay a lot of attention here to making decisions based on facts and data – not on feeling and conjecture. There’s a lot to be said for that, as it forces you to pay close attention to tangible outcomes and results instead of investing thousands of dollars because you think it might be the right thing to do.
But there are times when “feelings” can – and should – have a significant impact on your decision-making process.
I read a story a number of years ago about a New York City fire captain, who, upon arriving at the scene of a building and walking into an apartment, immediately ordered all of the other firefighters out of the apartment – NOW.
Seconds later, the floor they had all been standing on just seconds before gave way…and fell into the burning apartment just one story below.
When they interviewed the fire captain afterward, and tried to understand what had led to the immediate action that quite likely saved several lives and many injuries, he said that he didn’t know exactly what it was, but something told him there was something terribly wrong with the situation.
Later on, he was able to piece together exactly what it was: the floor was hotter than it should have been, and yet there was no smoke in the apartment. That told him, unconsciously, and as a result of years of experience, that the fire must have been burning directly below.
The “gut feeling” was just his body compiling this information and feeding it to him in the quickest and most efficient way possible under the circumstances.
Similarly, our brains collect and process information continuously, and feed the results back to us in a variety of ways – including kinesthetically – through intuition, hunches, and gut feelings.
And you can probably think of a time when you had something like this occur, ignored the feeling, and paid a price for it.
Gut feelings aren’t a substitute for measuring key areas of your business and acting on tangible results. But they can be an additional factor – one that can give you an edge over the competition if used properly.
The Kardashians: Then and Now
January 27, 2010
I listen to people complain constantly about all sorts of things, and then watch them act in a way that actually perpetuates the exact thing they’re complaining about.
They complain about not having enough money, but spend way too much on things they really don’t need. They complain about not having enough energy, but don’t do activities that will energize themselves. And they complain about not having enough time to get everything done, but squander their free time on mindless distractions.
In all fairness, I’ve been guilty of all three of these from time to time, with the entrepreneur’s fascination with “bright shiny objects” being one of my biggest problems. And yet, people seem to have such a fascination with other people’s lives that entire publishing empires exist just to serve this market.
On my two most recent trips to the supermarket, I’ve glanced at the magazines displayed at the checkout aisles. Us Weekly featured the headline:
The Kardashians: Then and Wow!
USA Today featured an article about Kate (from “Jon & Kate Plus 8″) and her 20-hour hair makeover with this headline:
Kate Gosselin Puts Some Curl in Her New Hair
Articles about people who are famous for, well… being famous . And we haven’t even gotten into Brad and Angelina, Tiger’s “rehab,” or whole magazines dedicated to television soap operas.
There’s nothing wrong with taking some time for yourself to just relax and do something mindless like read a trashy novel or watch something on TV (“Modern Family” is our current favorite), but too much of anything can be dangerous, and spending too much time worrying about the lives of celebrities – or even fictional characters – robs you of valuable time you could be spending on more important things.
Take a few minutes and think carefully about what’s commanding your attention. Focus on what’s truly important, and maybe you’ll become so successful that someone will write a magazine article about you!
What Do You Know?
January 13, 2010
As I talk to our clients and members, I find that a lot of them are anxious about making 2010 a better year than 2009 was – in some cases, a much better year. They’re trying to take full advantage of everything we provide them in our various coaching groups, from our Business Self-Defense™ Program, and from our Inner Circle Newsletters and CDs.
If you find yourself in the position of looking for some resources to help you navigate your way through this recession, then there’s one thing you must be aware of:
There’s a profound difference between knowing and memorizing.
As an example, many years ago when I worked for a large telecommunications company, a group of us was sent to a leadership training class. The instructor was a professor from a college in the area.
About 20 minutes into the program, I started to get a little uncomfortable with what he was teaching – not because it was inappropriate, but it just didn’t sound right. Oh, it made sense on the surface, but there was just something about what he was saying that made me think it wouldn’t work in our group
So when we got to a break, I wanted to find out what was causing this uneasy feeling. We had this conversation in the hallway:
Me: I was just curious – where have you personally applied these management strategies in a high-tech software development environment?
Him: Well, I’m a professor of behavioral psychology at NC State University.
Me: I’m sorry; I may not have stated that question quite right – where have you personally applied these management strategies in a high-tech software development environment?
Him: Well, we’ve done years of research on what works and what doesn’t work in a variety of settings.
Me: I’m still interested in where you have personally applied these management strategies in a high-tech software development environment?
Him: Me personally? I guess I really haven’t.
Me: Then why is it appropriate to stand in front a group of very stressed out, overloaded managers and tell us this is the way we should run our groups?
Him: Because I’m a professor of behavioral psychology at NC State University!
There’s a huge difference between theory and practice – between memorizing and knowing. Whenever you seek advice – on any subject – make sure you’re dealing with someone with practical experience and not just a passing interest in the subject.
The Flash Pass
December 2, 2009
The Flash Pass
Whenever I speak to groups about marketing their products or services, I always stress that, ultimately, it’s about the experience people have when interacting with the company as much as it’s about what they’re actually buying.
And it’s equally important to note that customers are often willing to pay more for a better experience, whether buying something in a store, planning a trip, or retaining professional services. Hey, even my kids – college students both on very limited budgets – hate Walmart so much they’re willing to pay a bit more to shop at other stores with better service.
Ignoring this basic fact of human nature can cost you a small fortune in lost business. So with that in mind, here’s an example of one company that understands this: the Six Flags theme park company.
Six Flags owns and operates 20 locations in the US, Canada, and Mexico, and is working to establish an international presence over the next few years. And one of the keys to their success is recognizing and meeting the needs of guests willing to pay more for a better experience.
And they do this with two different programs. I’ll explain them both in a minute, but first, let’s have a brief review of what happens when you go to a theme park – any theme park.
You get up early, drag the family out of bed so you can be there right when the gates open. You pay more for parking than you thought the park tickets were going to cost, and then you buy the tickets themselves.
As soon as the clock strikes eight, and they let everyone in, there’s a mad dash – kids in tow, their feet barely touching the ground, as you try to get in line for the “premium” rides – the ones everyone wants to get on. And – good for you – you get a good place in line! But what happens next? You go on to the next great ride, where you’re greeted by a line that will eat up at least 45 minutes of your day. And you have five other big rides to go on. Plus you have to get lunch at some point. Sounds like a fun vacation, doesn’t it?
So recognizing this, Six Flags introduced the Flash Pass. When you get to the ride you want to go on, the Flash Pass holds your place in line electronically so you can go on other rides instead of waiting on line. When it’s almost your turn, the Flash Pass device notifies you. The process doesn’t put you at the front of the line, but it lets you go on other rides instead of waiting in line.
The cost? $34.99 per person for the regular Flash Pass, or $64.99 for the Gold Flash Pass that cuts your wait time by approximately 75%. And that’s on top of the $44.99 per person admission price ($29.99 each for children).
But if that’s not enough, they also have VIP Tours that include front-of-the-line ride privileges, valet parking, reserved show seating, meals and snacks, and a private autograph session with some of the characters.
The cost? $249.00 per person. At least this one includes the park admission fee. Still, for a family of four, that’s $1,000.00 of revenue to attach a minimum-wage teenager to your group for the day.
Not a bad return on investment, and certainly a fantastic illustration of offering premium products and services for people willing to pay for a premium experience.
The question on your mind right now shouldn’t be, “Who in their right mind would pay that much money?!” It should be, “What can I offer that would deliver superior value at a higher price?” Answering that question can be as much fun as a trip to a theme park!
Growing Strong Brands
November 25, 2009
People seem to be almost obsessed with the concept of “branding” – the idea that an identity and a logo are somehow all you need to achieve massive business success. And while new entrepreneurs with grand ideas might be forgiven for drinking this Kool-Aid, certainly large companies would understand the place of branding in the grand scheme of things. Wouldn’t they?
At least I assumed they would. That is, of course, until I heard an interview last week on NPR. It seems that General Motors has been making some progress in their efforts to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and to get some insight into this development, they were interviewing an executive, Susan Docherty, VP of Sales for GM.
When asked about the current state of affairs, Docherty said, “We’re not declaring victory yet but we’re certainly making progress towards growing strong brands and driving positive business results.”
I thought the order in which she listed the two goals was interesting: “growing strong brands” and “positive business results.”
Because if I’m a GM employee, a stockholder, or the owner of a GM vehicle, I could care less about the “strong brand.”
Oldsmobile used to be a strong brand, around for over 100 years. At one time, the Olds Cutlass, a car I proudly owned in my younger days, was the top-selling car in the world, an honor long since held by the Toyota Camry. The last Oldsmobile rolled off the assembly line on April 29, 2004.
Ironically, almost five years to the day later (April 27, 2009) GM announced that it would be phasing out Pontiac, another strong brand, by the end of 2010. Pontiac has been building cars since 1926, and was responsible for the famous Firebird Trans Am model, featured prominently in the movie “Smokey and the Bandit” and on the 1980s TV series, “Knight Rider.”
Two strong brands with long and amazing histories of innovation and popularity, both gone in the blink of an eye.
Now if they had been paying attention to changing consumer preferences; if they had taken more seriously the mass exodus of their loyal customers to foreign competitors; if they had focused on numbers instead of brands, then maybe GM wouldn’t find itself in the situation it does now.
And remember, this is a very large company that actually has the luxury (and the budget) to spend the huge amounts necessary to even attempt brand advertising. You do not. And that’s why it’s important that you measure, analyze, and make business decisions based on the direct return on investment of every marketing dollar you spend.
Because I’d hate to read in the paper that your brand was being discontinued.
Maturity of Technique
November 6, 2009
People seem to be in a rush these days. Rushing to get from work to the gym. Rushing to get to the next vacation. Rushing to get promoted to the next level at work. I’ve certainly been guilty of all three at different points in my life. But sometimes it’s better to take it slow.
When I started training in the martial arts, nearly 30 years ago, I took to it instantly…and intensely. My life at that time consisted primarily of work and karate. Sometimes I took as many as four classes in a single day. I clearly remember the head instructor seeing me in my fourth class, and muttering to no one in particular, “Rosenberg’s hooked…”
Because I was putting in so much time and effort in my training, I was able to move up through the various belt levels much faster than was typical. I ultimately got my first-degree black belt in just two years when four years was the norm at that particular school.
But my training partner kept chiding me to not keep testing and getting promoted so quickly. “But I’ve mastered the skills required for each belt level,” I protested. He agreed, but pointed out something profound: “There’s such a thing,” he explained, “as maturity of technique.”
Instead of getting promoted from orange belt to green belt, he suggested, why not spend a little more time there and get everything out of being an orange belt you possibly can?
This same concept applies to absolutely everything you do at work and at home. It translates to living deliberately.- to squeezing everything you possibly can out of everything you do and every situation you experience.
This alone won’t earn you a Black Belt in the martial arts (or even in Business Self-Defense), but it is an essential skill to achieving great things and living a rich life.
Disney Obsession?
October 29, 2009
Prospective customers can be broken down based on three broad categories: demographics, psychographics, and subcultures.
Briefly, demographics refer to characteristics which are easy to observe or determine: age, gender, race, education, location, etc. Psychographics point to more subjective areas including personality, interests, hobbies, and attitudes. Subcultures come into play when psychographics take on a dominant role in the person’s everyday life. Examples might include vegans, bikers, endurance athletes and “Trekkies.”
Let’s look at an example of how you could use knowledge of these characteristics to your marketing advantage.
We have some friends who probably wouldn’t object to describing them as “Disney fanatics.” They have original animation cells hanging on their walls; they own lots of Disney paraphernalia; and they go on Disney cruises for their vacations.
And they’re not alone – there’s a whole subculture of people who have been Disney fans from a very young age (another important lesson we’ll address another time). But if you knew who these people were and had something to sell to them, you could use Disney references, Disney gifts, and Disney stories as a component of your sales letters.
Because when you speak the language of your prospects you connect better with them, build rapport more quickly, and get better results.
Sure it takes a bit of effort to do this successfully, but your list is your greatest asset, and taking full advantage of your unique and intimate knowledge of it is your best marketing weapon.
Good Question!
October 23, 2009
People spend a great deal of time, money, and effort trying to find “answers” to the questions that are keeping them awake at night. But that’s not necessarily the best way to get results.
As you know, if you’ve been reading this newsletter for at least four months, we belong to a high-level marketing group that meets three times a year in Baltimore. One of the highlights of the two days we spend there is the open Q&A session that takes place on the evening of the first night.
And, after being in this group for three years now, I’ve noticed something interesting: the best questions get the best answers. It’s a pattern I’ve seen repeated time and time again in a variety of situations.
People who think out their questions and send them to me in advance of our monthly Gold Coaching webinars, teleseminars, and one-on-one coaching calls, solicit better – and more useful – information from these sessions than people who are more or less unprepared.
One of our key success principles is that if you don’t ask the right questions then the answers are meaningless. Make sure you’re asking the right questions of your customers, your staff…and yourself.
Sorry, You Can’t Get the Discount
October 15, 2009
It’s good to encourage people to take action, but sometimes balance is important too. Back in July, our daughter had her tonsils out. And in case you’re conjuring up images of an adorable little child eating popsicles for a few days and then heading on back to kindergarten, let me clear this up for you quickly: our daughter is 18 years old, not five.
And let me assure you, a tonsillectemy is a much different experience when you’re 18. For starters, the pain level is much more intense, even more so when the patient has a low threshold of pain to begin with. Basically, two weeks of torture for everyone involved.
But she came through with flying colors, and the procedure was a success on all counts. I only wish I could say the same for the billing procedures of the surgery center.
Of course, our health insurance covered most of the costs for the ENT doctor, the anesthesiologist, and the day-surgery center, but, as usually is the case these days, we did have co-pays and deductibles to deal with.
We received the bill from the surgery center in September. (Apparently, it takes two months to get everything cleared through the insurance company – a separate problem all its own.) We put it in our stack of bills to be paid at the beginning of October, paid it as scheduled by check, and didn’t think about it again.
That is, until we got a second letter from the surgery center, informing us that if they received payment by October 15, they would give us a 20% early-payment discount. Mind you, they didn’t mention this in the original bill, nor was there any indication that you could pay by credit card, which, apparently, is allowed.
Thinking that this would be simple matter, Lorie called, explained how she had sent in the check, confirmed that they would have it by the 15th, and asked them to send us a check for the 20% early-payment amount.
No, they explained, they couldn’t do that. I won’t bore you with the complete details since you’ve almost certainly experienced the kind of bureaucratic incompetence that causes “customer service representatives” to adhere blindly to processes when pure common sense would dictate a different course of action.
Suffice it to say that Lorie held fast, spoke to not one, but two supervisors, and finally got it resolved. Not, by the way, that they would send us a check for the 20%, but that they would return the original check, and we would then resubmit the amount less the 20% payment, creating more work for both us and them!
I know, it didn’t make much sense to me either, but that’s kind of the point of this entire article: processes are good things. They make it easy to provide consistent service. They give you a starting point for improving procedures. But when the rules and guidelines people follow make things complicated for their customers or members, then it’s time to take another tack.
As difficult as it was to see our daughter suffer through the original recovery process, dealing with these people was almost as painful. Make sure you don’t do the same thing to your customers.
Shoo Fly
September 28, 2009
There was an old song that had the lyrics:
Shoo fly, don’t bother me
Shoo fly, don’t bother me
Shoo fly, don’t bother me
‘Cause I belong to somebody
And this week we’ll be talking about flies for a bit. It always seems to happen – you’re having a nice picnic somewhere, when a fly shows up and lands right on your plate. You shoo it away, but he just keeps coming back, a constant reminder that you’re in his territory.
Well, something similar happened to me, but it wasn’t at a picnic. It actually happened on a bike ride.
We were out on a short mid-week ride – around 20 or so miles on a nice stretch of gently rolling terrain. We were riding in a tight paceline – one bike very close to the one ahead of it to get the same “drafting” effect ducks and geese get when they fly in “V” formation.
So we’re tooling along, around 19 mph and then I spot it out of the corner of my eye: a large deerfly. And I don’t just mean I had to dodge my head to avoid being hit in the face – I mean he was flying right alongside of us, weaving in and out of the different bicyclists’ heads like he was looking for someone in particular.
And the most amazing part was that he kept this up for nearly three miles.
I don’t know if anyone else noticed this or even cared if they did; but I was most spellbound by this spectacle – a deerfly keeping pace with a pack of cyclists going 19 mph for three miles!
Thinking I might have been hallucinating, I checked online when I got back home. Turns out deerflies can actually move that fast. They can’t keep it up indefinitely, but when they decide they need to, they crank it up a notch.
Are you the same way? When you have a great opportunity or an urgent deadline, can you put on a burst of speed that can get you to the finish line? It’s not something you want to do constantly – because you’ll end up burning out if you do – but when you need to, a quick, intense, and focused effort can make the difference between failure and success.
