Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Last Thursday, I was watching Whose Line Is It Anyway?, as Wayne Brady invented a song, on the spot, like no one else can. Drew Carey would throw out a musical style, the audience would yell out topics, and Wayne would instantly compose and sing a song, with perfect rhymes, double entendres, wit and humor.
That got me thinking a lot about improvisation, which has been a big part of my life since I started playing guitar at age 12. Improvisation became a theme a few more times throughout the weekend, inspiring this week’s newsletter, Improvise your success.
Improvise your success connects, chimpanzees, bonobos, The Second City, jazz and my second book together to create this message: Improvise!
There is a place in business for policy and programming, and there are many places for improvising. So what do you think? Is improv important to your business success?
Newsletter link: Improvise your success
Posted in Conversation, Creativity, We relationships | 6 Comments »
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
Sales and marketing are not about telling stories. Sales and marketing are about helping your customer create a story, in his mind, in which you figure as a prominent, clear, vibrant character. If your customer tells himself a meaningful, motivating story that includes you, he will be much more likely to get more involved with you, and take actions that improve your business results.
Stop telling stories about yourself. Instead, figure out how to make yourself part of your customer’s story.
Posted in Customer Encounters, Marketing | 1 Comment »
Friday, December 11th, 2009
Yesterday, I ran into a 24-year old young man who is the son of close family friends. I’ve known “Jake” since he was a little kid, so I’ve seen for years that he has a magnetic, charismatic personality, and has always been able to attract friends.
About a year ago Jake started working for a local firm selling life insurance and investments – a very difficult career for anyone to start at a young age, with its long sales cycles and the need to get people to trust you with their money. He and I work out at the same club, so I see him on a regular basis and have a chance to hear updates on his progress. Some days I’d see him, elated, after a promising meeting with a prospect. Sometimes he was discouraged he wasn’t closing more sales yet.
My comments to him: You have started a career path where long-term relationships create riches. If you have enough great meetings with prospects now, you will start to build relationships with some of them. When you are 40, some of the relationships you start this month may be paying your mortgage. Meetings you have next month will start relationships that will help send your kids to college. If anybody can make it in this business, you can. The only question: Can you wait?
In most businesses, customer relationships are your most valuable asset. Jake has chosen a business where this is especially true, with great rewards for those who can create and nurture long-term relationships. But we’re all like Jake to an extent: Can we be patient and invest now, one relationship-building encounter at a time, in building those relationships that will help us prosper in the future?
Certainly, Jake could use his exceptional relationship-building skills for more short-term financial gains. He could be a waiter in a fine-dining restaurant, creating 45-minute relationships that, I’m sure, would earn him the largest tips of all the servers. But, beyond the few repeat customers who ask for him, these relationships wouldn’t create lasting value for Jake. If his insurance job is like that of a christmas tree farmer, being a waiter would be more like that of a migrant worker, earning wages for today but starting over tomorrow.
I’m rooting for Jake, and for his firm. If he and they can be patient, all will benefit, including Jake’s future clients, since We relationships create strong benefits for both buyers and sellers.
It’s easy to look at Jake’s situation and think, “I’m glad that’s not me. I could never sell insurance.” And yes, specifically, I could never sell insurance. I’d go nuts. But Jake’s job really isn’t selling insurance. It’s building relationships that differentiate him from other providers in the minds of his clients. And when we recognize that we again remind ourselves that Jake’s challenge is our challenge: Do we want to be the migrant worker or the christmas tree farmer? Do we want to build our business around short-term transactions that produce their yields now, or do we want to invest in a rich, bountiful future harvest?
Posted in We relationships | 1 Comment »
Monday, September 21st, 2009
In every customer interaction, there are only three things that can happen:
- Your relationship gets better
- Your relationship stays the same
- Your relationship gets worse
Scenario #1 is an “encounter.” Scenarios #2 & #3 are “transactions.”
As you interact with people this week, in the course of doing your work, notice this at the end of each interaction: Is my relationship with this person better now than it was at the start of the interaction? Have we created a relationship-building encounter?
Here are a few places you can learn more about the differences between encounters and transactions:
- Chapter 2 in my book, We: The Ideal Customer Relationship.
- My free ebook, Encounters, which can be downloaded on the right side of this page.
- This newsletter, The Encounter Habit.
- And numerous blog posts on this site.
But, for this week, focus on encounter awareness. Notice whether you are creating encounters or transactions.
Then, work on creating more encounters. Even if you are a master of business relationship-building, you have room for improvement. Everyone does. Every customer interaction is not only an opportunity to build a relationship, it is an opportunity to practice the skill of encounter, one of the most valuable business skills you can have.
Posted in Customer Encounters | 4 Comments »
Monday, September 14th, 2009
Conversation. Genuine Dialogue.
Relationship-building encounters can’t happen without it.
Make this a week of awareness about conversation. During every interaction – with customers, vendors, partners, colleagues, bosses, direct reports, etc. – keep “The Conversationometer” alive in your mind:
- Are you and the other person engaged, at each moment, in true, genuine dialogue, or is one (or both) of you practicing “monologue disguised as dialogue?”
- How fluid is the conversation? What can you do to make it more fluid?
- How well are both of you listening?
- How relevant are your responses to each other? Are each of your answers and comments based on what came before in the conversation, or on a “pre-approved agenda” you wanted to force into the conversation?
Monologue does not move relationships forward. Conversation is critical.
Make this a week of conversation.
Posted in Conversation | 3 Comments »
Monday, August 17th, 2009
(My usual caveat: This is not a customer service story. It is a relationship-building-encounter-missed-opportunity story. Much more interesting. Bad customer service stories have become boring.)
I had just arrived in San Antonio the evening before a speech, flying back to the states from overseas. I walked down the beautiful San Antonio Riverwalk and found a restaurant for dinner. The waiter brought the obligatory bowl of salsa and basket of chips.
“Is it possible to get a few corn tortillas instead of the chips?” I asked. “I don’t want to eat anything fried, but I’d love to have something to eat with the salsa.” My body clock was still wound 8 time zones ahead, and I could sense that any food that had been fried in oil would cause an immediate and significant increase in the effects of jet lag.
“Hmmm,” the waiter said, pondering his options. “I have to ask the cooks for the tortillas, and I’ll probably have to charge you for them.”
“Do what you can,” I answered.
A few minutes later he brought me two soft corn tortillas, and asked, “Have you decided what you like to order?”
What a missed opportunity.
I told him something very specific about me – that I didn’t want to eat fried food. This was a gift I handed to him on a silver platter – a tip-laden, relationship-building-encounter-possibility, wrapped-with-a-bow present that he completely missed.
The fact that I didn’t want to eat fried food represented 1% of 1% of 1% of the totality of Steve Yastrow. It was a small detail … but an important detail.
What if the interaction had gone like this:
“Is it possible to get a few corn tortillas instead of the chips? I don’t want to eat anything fried, but I’d love to have something to eat with the salsa.”
“You don’t want to eat fried foods? I’ll check if I can get any tortillas for you. Would you like me look at the menu you with you so we can find choices that aren’t fried for an appetizer and your entrée?”
It’s a world of difference.
As I wrote above, don’t confuse this with a story about customer service. That’s so 2005. This is a story about how easy it is to show a customer you understand some unique detail about them, and then to honor that unique detail, with very little effort. The result if you do this? By focusing on a little detail (a “spice” as we refer to them at Yastrow & Company) your customer thinks, “Wow. They understand me.”
We share 99.5% of our DNA with all of the other 7 billion human beings on earth. What makes us special are the fine details that exist in the last ½%. In cooking, the spices that make up the smallest portion of the volume of a dish add the most to the dish’s flavor and personality. It is the same with people.
So, don’t make the mistake my waiter made. If a customer lets you in on a secret detail of his or her life, look at it as a gift, not an inconvenient challenge to your corporate policies.
Posted in Customer Encounters | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Last week on tompeters.com, Steve explored a new concept that we are living in a post-customer service age. He continues the theme this week with his newsletter, The Post-Customer Service Age: A Cinderella Story. He asks us to ignore the bad customer service stories and focus on beating the best customer service-oriented companies through relationship building encounters. A tale with a moral, indeed.
Posted in Customer Encounters, We relationships | No Comments »
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Many hours in airplanes, the beautiful Indian Ocean, and a chance to practice “now.” One of the things I really like about traveling to far-away time zones is the chance to practice some life and business fundamentals that contribute directly to business success.
Here’s a short video I shot yesterday:
I’m carrying on with my theme of the last week, focusing on really specific things we can all do to improve our business relationships and relationship-building encounters, moment by moment. Some of the biggest obstacles to being effective with business relationships are the zillions of distractions that keep up from being present as we engage with others. Practice “now.”
Posted in Customer Encounters, Invent Your Future | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
Today’s newsletter is called “The Encounter Habit.” Here’s the rub: Relationship-building encounters are the most important products you produce, every day. At any moment during a customer interaction, monitor how well things are going, and be alert and ready to improve the encounter. It can be done!
Pay attention! Be alert! At any point in time, you can turn a customer interaction into a relationship-building encounter, and avoid having it devolve into a relationship-eroding transaction.
I’ve just landed at Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, from where I will fly to Mauritius later today, landing early tomorrow morning. Continuing my theme from my “Pain is Inevitable, Suffering is Optional” post at the beginning of this 17-day odyssey, I successfully managed not to let United Airlines’ silliness upset my travel peace of mind, even during the O’Hare check-in process that required two lines, one for checking in and one for checking passports. (Could have been the “Not” example in an Industrial Engineering 101 class. )
I know it’s strange, but I really like these transition days in Europe … somewhat serene from too little sleep, ready for a new adventure. Check out my “Warsaw Walking Yoga with Joni Mitchell” video blog from last summer. Regrettably, I don’t have enough time before my next flight to go into Paris for a few hours, so I’ll have to find something interesting in the airport. Hey, I might even have a chance to practice the Encounter Habit.
(Post update 8:30AM Mauritius Time, Wednesday, 11:30PM Chicago time, Tuesday: Just arrived in Mauritius. Beautiful suite at Le Meridien’s resort, overlooking the Indian Ocean on the north shore of the island. After a zillion hours on airplanes I should sleep, but I need to go outside. Finally got to meet my friend, client and host, Kiran Dinaran of Multievents, in person, after months of Skype and email. Looking forward to a great couple of days here.)
Posted in Customer Encounters | 9 Comments »
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
Every day we’re on the phone with people, and we notice they are going through emails, or surfing the web, while talking with us. Everyone I speak with has this experience, regularly.
How do we notice this? Because we notice that the person we are speaking with is not engaged with us. We notice that the flow of conversation is broken. We notice that the other person has no idea what we just said. We hear the clicks of their keyboard.
I wrote a post back in December called, Are you here? in which I encouraged readers to call people out if they are not paying attention during a conversation, particularly a phone conversation.
My brother Phil and I were talking tonight, and we were trying to decide on a clever way to do this. We were looking for a short, powerful phrase to say to people that would have the meaning of, “Hey, are you with me? I’d love it if you would stop looking at your computer screen and focus on our conversation!”
We first thought about yelling out, “Slimy!” because for years we’ve pronounced the word “emails” backwards as “slimy,” as in, “I’m going to go fire up my laptop and check my slimy.” But, I know, that’s way to obscure. (Oh, did I forget to mention, Phil and I have a very strange habit of speaking backwards with each other? We’ve been doing it since we were little kids. Can you see how “emails” would be “slimy?”)
Do you have any great suggestions for this call out?
It might be as simple as, “Are you with me?”
Or, “Is now a good time to talk?”
Or, “Would you like me to wait?”
Or, “If you’re transcribing this conversation, be sure to spell my name correctly. It’s S-T-E ..”
Or, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” just to test if they are listening.
I’d love your suggestions. (And, of course, if you ever notice me doing “slimy” while we’re on the phone, you have my permission to call me out, with whatever phrase you want.)
Posted in Conversation | 10 Comments »
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