Let’s say a restaurant places coupons in the local newspaper.  That costs a finite amount of money.  Tracking the business that comes from the coupons is easy, too.  At the end of each day, just calculate the difference between average sales and sales with the coupons.  Divide that amount of revenue by the amount spent on the coupons and the resulting figure is the ROI.  If ROI is negative, the coupons didn’t work and the owner will stop doing them.  If the number is positive, he’ll do them again next week. 

Now let’s throw in a curve ball:  The day the coupons were taken in, the service team wa a group of back-ups with little or no experience and the manager wasn’t there.  Which had a bigger impact on ROI, the coupons or the people taking care of the business?  The point is this:  Does any marketing strategy really have more impact on a small business than the blood, sweat and tears of the business owner and key personnel?  Organizations are really good at assigning value to time:  It’s called SALARY.  (Otherwise known as the amount they pay to own YOU.)  If you’re a full-time employee paid $20,800 a year, your time is worth $10 per hour.  That’s easy.  What about the owner who has poured his heart and soul into the business?  Is he or she counting the hours worked during the start-up phase?  Not hardly.  But how does one quantify for the purposes of ROI the value of the time they spend making their vision a reality?  If they listened to the pundits, small business owners would give up before they started.  And I wouldn’t have a family.

1.  You have a thing that others want to have

2.  You have knowledge that others want to learn

3.  You have a relationship that others want to share

If you are the possessor of a thing, knowledge, or a relationship that someone else finds interesting, intriguing or desirable, you will have their undivided attention when talking about how to get it.  When you throw money into the mix the whole equation changes…UNLESS you add a proportionate amount of value.  If they have to pay for the interaction without an understanding of what’s in it for them, disrespect soon follows.  You begin having to prove not only yourself, but your value to them.   

So what will make them WANT to follow you, seek you out, read about you, learn what you know, etc?  It’s not really that hard:  Show them not only how to do it, but that it CAN be done, especially when you’re talking about a dramatic change in how they will be pursuing goals, knowledge, or relationships going forward.  As Zig Ziglar once said:  “You can get anything in life you want if you help enough other people get what they want.”

So many people see any gathering of multiple people as an opportunity to promote what they do to others.  That’s what we’re taught in “sales school”, right?  “If someone doesn’t know what you do, how can they ever ask you for help?”  is a common argument.  Totally understandable in the old way of thinking, but what about today when there are hundreds of alternatives to the products and services we offer?  Does it really matter more than who we are as people?  And if I don’t really like you as a person, why in the world would I want to do business with you?  If you’re attending a party among friends, they already know what you do. 

Santa is certainly kind enough to give you his business card if you ask for it, but he’s not going to just hand them out without being asked first…perhaps you shouldn’t either.

There has to be a better way to help people get what they need in this business besides using scary stories of human tragedy that usually elicit a “”it won’t ever happen to me” response.  What’s the missing piece of the puzzle?

So, how does one get their point across?  A very good way is e-mail.  It forces you to think about the problem and how to communicate it before you press “send”.  If the phone is the preferred method, the discussion tends to be improvisational unless the call is scripted in advance.  This then wastes 10 minutes on a 1-minute point.  By using e-mail, both parties also have a record of the question and the response so a printed copy is available if the response was forgotten in 6 months.

Once inside, what we found was an incredibly limited yet high quality selection of everything from bedding to furniture to accessories for every room in the house.  But what was really cool was this:  Instead of the plethora of paint shades and samples, Restoration Hardware had 32 carefully-selected colors…  Not 320, not 3200.  

How much stress could we eliminate from our lives if we weren’t overwhelmed with hundreds of low-quality choices and instead presented with a few high-value decisions to make each day?

The question in today’s world then becomes “Why is 10 pm the cutoff time for the phone ringing?”  Why is it acceptable to interrupt family time between 4 pm and 10 pm?  Is our family not as important as the 8 hours we just spent answering the phone at work?  A  time management CD produced a few years ago said:  ”The phone is for the convenience of the person who owns it, not for the person who is using it.”  In other words, we are not required to jump to attention every time the phone rings, especially since 8 out of 10 times it’s someone calling to sell us something.  Surprises are only fun on birthdays or if someone you love is on the other end of that unexpected call.  And unless it is either of those cases, is anything ever said in a phone conversation that can’t at least be started in an e-mail (No SPAM, please)?  How often when the phone does ring is it actually an emergency?  Maybe once or twice per year.  Anyone know where to get one of those glass cubes?