New guy was there, taking Michael’s place. He had these little amazing eggplants with him, and he wasn’t prepared to let anyone walk away from the stand without one.
Each person who walked up to buy lettuce or raspberries heard, in detail, about the eggplants. And a huge number of people bought.
I did. They were delicious.
Most people are afraid of eggplant. They won’t buy it. They need to be sold it.
And after they’re sold, they’re often glad they were sold.
In our permission marketing world, sometimes it’s easy to forget how important selling is. Not because people are so stupid that they need to be sold something. Not because selling is obsolete because you can just search for what you want and then buy it. No, because selling overcomes fear. Fear of closing, fear of commitment, fear of blanching or sauteeing or just plain fear of buying something.
Salespeople who sell properly sell stuff people wish they would have bought in the first place. It’s a huge service… I’m pretty sure we need more good salespeople, not less.
July 8, 2006
Well, maybe the car is the most important (in terms of impact), but air conditioning comes close, and for much more subtle reasons.
You may have noticed that July is a little slow where you are. Same here. Web traffic goes down, productivity goes down, people work less, move slower, the whole bit. In Europe, I’ve heard, entire countries shut down in August.
How come?
The heat.
There’s a reason that New York City isn’t in Belize.
For centuries, modern man in the Northern Hemisphere has adapted to a "don’t work so hard it’s hot" mindset. In places where it’s hot all the time, this is a huge hit on the economy, as you can imagine.
So what’s the big deal with air conditioning?
Well, in addition to leveling off the year (you can work just as comfortably in July in New York as you can in November now), air conditioning levels off the world. Air conditioning permits knowledge workers to thrive in India or Cancun. Air conditioning creates year-round demand for all sorts of items that would have been seasonal otherwise (from nice restaurants to shoes…)
And air conditioning has plenty of unintended (side) effects. As the less-industrialized world realizes that air conditioning pays for itself with huge increases in productivity, they buy more (air conditioning has only been popular worldwide for forty years… it’s still catching on). As people buy more, they use more energy, create more greenhouse gases, make the world hotter. Price of energy goes up… etc.
And as a marketer, air conditioning changes your world. You grew up not needing to worry about Ecuador, because it wasn’t a competitor and it wasn’t a market. Now it’s both.
Something to think about when it’s 90 degrees outside.
I discovered the power of business writing when I brought his article Marketing Myopia to the president of Activision in 1983. I was applying to be a summer intern. He was president of the fastest growing company in the history of the world (really). I told him how the company was about to completely miss the PC revolution and probably fail.
Jim looked at the article, looked at me, preparing to throw me out forever.
At that moment, a secretary walked in with the CashBox top 10 list of bestselling video games. Activision had 8 of 10. He smiled. He forgot about me. He looked over, smiled, and said, "You’re hired!"
For complicated reasons, I never did work at Activision. But Ted Levitt changed my life. Thanks, Ted, wherever you are!
The Global Small Business Blog: Harvard Professor Who Coined "Globalization" Dies.
July 7, 2006
John asked this after my previous post.
Digg is an amazing community ranking service for news. It’s also addictive.
If you show up on the top of the Digg listings, your traffic soars.
So now, of course, it makes sense to write Diggable stuff. Like this masterpiece: Micro Persuasion: 25 Things I Learned on Google Trends. Diggbait.
July 6, 2006
Corey points us to these search results: (will probably be fixed by the time you get there, so here’s a screen shot). Google appears to be trying to show me what many people who searched for something also searched for (scroll down the picture)… but it’s not quite right yet.
Okay, if this stuff is so obvious, how come no one does it: The Guide to Avoiding Small Talk at Okdork.com. (Also worth noting that being Digg-bait is changing the way people write.)
Thanks, Noah.
Kyle points us to dallasobserver.com | News | Eye of the Beholder. Turns out a clever new website/live networking biz got infiltrated by a snarky journalist. Journalist writes engaging story ripping into clever organization. She doesn’t want to belong to an organization that would have her as a member (for the record, I’d never even get in, and I probably wouldn’t join if I could, but that’s the whole point).
Organization responds with a bunch of photos on their site.
The controversy aside, the interesting lesson is about life on the edges. If the Beautiful Room was called "a bunch of interesting people who get together for drinks now and then" it wouldn’t be particularly easy to notice.
Just got a note from a friend of mine with a successful indie music career. He does very well with his live gigs and self-published CDs. Recently, he was approached by a small but significant music label that wants to publish his next album.
His question, "When will they pitch me on how they can help me get to the next level?"
My answer, which would be equally true for book publishing and one hundred and ten other industries is, "they won’t."
There are plenty of businesses that take for granted two thoughts:
1. our medium/approach is the best way to accomplish something
and
2. yes, we have competitors, but we’re all pretty similar and if we’re willing to work with you, you should say yes right away.
So, if you wanted to publish a book, or appear in a play or get a job writing or waittressing or doing telemarketing, it was a seller’s market. Hey, if we’re offering you something, we can argue about the price, but of course you’ll say yes.
But hey, Mr. MCI, now I can use Skype! Hey Mr. Warner, I can publish on iTunes and CDBaby!
Are you a beggar or a chooser? The people you want the most will be the very first people to choose the new alternatives.
Tim Manners does a great summary of Gamal Aziz’s work at MGM: reveries magazine: Working Backward.
My takeaway is a bit different. I don’t think he’s succeeding because of his tactics (the fact that big money is flowing into Vegas and he’s building venues that attract people with big money is a very happy coincidence–$400 haircuts won’t be the answer forever), but I do believe that the idea of working backwards is essential if you want to maximize growth.
In a nutshell, regardless of how well a product or service is performing, Aziz starts with the potential that product has (when it hits 11 on the dial, or is completely sold out), then he subtracts what it’s doing and records the rest as a loss.
A loss!
That means that every book that doesn’t sell at least as well as the DaVinci Code is at some level, a failure.
For the masochists in the audience, this is a great way to set standards, no?
The reason this is interesting: not because it gives you yet another way to feel badly about your performance. Nope. Because it forces you to look at the capacity of your systems instead of focusing on their current performance. Airlines do this every day, of course, but I’m not sure most marketers do.
I think the reason you don’t see a lot of kids on unicycles is that they don’t come with training wheels.
[in the old days, I would have stopped there, making my point enigmatically]
Alas, most products that are hoping for growth in new markets forget to offer training wheels as well. Things like goji berries, Linux, tattoo parlors and yes, book publishers.
Unicycle training wheels wouldn’t even be that hard to do. Neither would a free sample pack of goji berries at the checkout.
July 5, 2006
