Pre-empting conversations

Affirmative action, client management, Fear, Trust

While my experience has been sales and then marketing, I also carry a revenue responsibility.

When you carry a revenue responsibility, managing client engagement becomes a major task.

A lot of times deciphering the why behind the what becomes a tight rope walk. Especially when you are selling services, where, unlike in the case of a product, the boundaries are not clearly defined, managing the gap between the customer expectations and the delivery of services is an every day challenge

One thing I have found useful is to pre-empt the conversation. You don’t give a chance to the customer to come and complain. You go and tell her the challenge, what could be the impact and how you think you are going to solve it. Then you ask the customer for suggestions so that she sees herself as superior to you, which helps manage her ego . Also since you have informed her of the problem, before she could complain, she is now partly responsible for finding the solution. This affirmative action also increases trust.

A lot of the out-bursts which happen when a customer complains, can be completely avoided if we pre-empt things. However most service delivery people are scared to do this out of fear, that the customer will fire them, not realizing that the firing in a complaint situation is even worse.

If you are in services, its always a good idea to pre-empt the conversation if you want to be successful.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Getting better in increments- Part 2

Affirmative action, compounding, Human Brain, Uncategorized

When you read self help books, the ask you to think of all the dreams you have and to write them down , then set goals etc. Etc.

I have read so many of those books, each time thinking that by following the advice in the book I would be able to achieve all my dreams sooner rather than later.

Each time I used to write the massive goals and then have a look at them everyday, after a few weeks I would kind of get disillusioned or distracted and give up because somewhere I think my brain used to keep working on the fact that this was not a feasible thing and it would not believe it.

However when I kept Small short term targets, I generally used to end up meeting them. In these situations I generally believed that it was possible and I could achieve it. This is why one of most recommended books on this blog has been Tiny Habits by B. J. Fogg.

This fact that the brain believes in small incremental targets makes a lot of sense if any eventually large target can be broken down into smaller incremental opportunities to achieve and then let the law of compounding play its role.

In my last post I had mentioned how Tony Hsieh in his book Delivering Happiness talks about a 1% improvement everyday can make you 365% better at the end of the year. Even if this seems an undoable thing , if we were to improve even 10% every quarter in whatever field we want, by the end of the year you would be more than 46% better than the previous year.

While reading Steven Kotler’s book The Art of Impossible, he’s actually got this incremental number to 4%. He says that if the challenge or target is 4% more than your current ability, then there’s enough anxiousness to perform but the brain doesn’t feel that it’s an impossible task and therefore there’s a large chance of success .

If you are like me who get overwhelmed with very high value targets or goals, then try doing this 4% method every month or 10% every quarter or anything which you think your brain will believe. As I have stated many times earlier, its our brain which plays games on us, so we have to find ways to trick the brain and use the law of compounding to our benefit.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Just Ask – you never know….

Affirmative action, Marketing, Product Management, Questions

There are lot of times when we can save a lot of time, effort, energy and eventual success, happiness if we were to Just Ask.

Somehow , we humans have – an ego – which causes us to feel that if the person whom we are asking refuses, then we will lose face or somehow people will make fun of us….etc. Since the human brain was designed to protect us, it ascribes all kinds of meanings to even small things. While I am preaching this, there are a lot of times, when I myself don’t follow this advice and then later wonder, what if I had just checked out.

I will give some real life examples of how by just asking – the persons got what they never thought was possible.

My colleague and I were coming back from Mumbai. Its a 2 hour flight to Delhi. You have to generally arrive at the airport about 3 hours before departure. We were travelling in a full fare airline, so they were providing us with snacks, coffee etc. Since were travelling in economy class however we were only getting a limited set of options in the food and drinks.

Both of us were in aisle seats, in the same row. The stewardess asked me for coffee / tea and I took my coffee. However my colleague did not take anything. After the stewardess had moved away from our row, he asked me if they didn’t serve juice. I was not sure so I told him “why don’t you just ask and you will come to know”. The good thing about this colleague of mine is that he generally takes my advice. So he asked the stewardess when she passed by him again.

And guess what – she said they don’t have it in economy class, but she will check in the first class and come back. In ten minutes my colleague was sipping fruit juice enjoying himself. But he would have not got it if he hadn’t asked.

In another situation my technical team mentioned that they had seen multiple options and the cost of taking licenses of a specific software were close to $14000/- for annual purchase. But we only needed to test our software so spending that kind of money didn’t make sense. So I asked on the minimum duration that would help them if I were to somehow get the licenses – so they said 2 weeks.

I then asked my colleague who handles the relationship with this software partner , to fix a short call with their product leader. Incidentally she had already set up contact with this person earlier and I had noticed that he was a helpful person. Luckily this person was available , he immediately responded back and we met on Zoom and I asked him if he could help.

Once more – we got the license to test our application with their software free of cost for a full month. The key thing about humans – is if you are kind to people and ask them in a pleasing way, most people will like to help.

My mother used to say the two most important phrases in the English language are “thank you sir/ma’am” and “if you can please”. It does not mean that your requests will always be accepted, but if you don’t ask, anyway it will not be accepted. By asking you are giving yourself a chance to play and find out.

We will look at the implications of this for marketing / product management

Till next time then….just ask….and you never know….

carpe Diem!!!

Thinking and Action – frameworks

Affirmative action, books, Flow, Frameworks, Habits, Human Brain, possibility thinking, problem solving

Till now I have been generally written about how the brain gets positive feelings when you do a gratitude exercise or when you do charity etc. This feeling helps your brain see more possibilities. This was actually topic of my last post. While all of this is true, I still was not able to figure out what will ensure that I keep taking action on a continuous basis because at the end of the day, just thinking won’t get you there, you need to take action.

This is not to degrade the thinking process. As a matter of fact if you spend time into thinking then the chances are that you will find a solution which may be extremely elegant and solve the problem. But you need to have the grit or persistence to work on the solution, figure out if it actually works, if it doesn’t, go back to the drawing board and find another solution.

How does someone ensure that they are always taking action. What will create that behaviour which will make me ensure that I am moving in the direction, to achieve my goals of the impossible while I am coming out with more creative solutions to handle my constraints.

While I am not sure if I have all the pieces of the puzzle in place for me, I do think that there’s a combination of things which I have observed when I have read the following 4 books – Tiny Habits by B.J.Fogg, The Art of the Impossible by Steven Kotler, A Beautiful Constraint by Adam Morgan & Mark Barden and Think Like a Rocket Scientist by Ozan Varol.

So two of the books – in no particular order – are about solving problems and handling constraints, one is about creating behaviours and the last is about taking your brain into a high performance agenda. over the next few weeks I will try to see if I can take out the best pieces of advice and put it into a framework for myself and see the results.

So there are some low levels activities which I completely stop doing – like writing emails. Then I create behaviours for small things which can make a huge impact for me, find processes and frameworks to resolve constraints – thinking tools and then get into flow to figure out creative solutions. If I can have prompts to help me do all this then I would have really figured out a way to not get stuck from time to time in time.

Once there’s a behaviour based on a habit, then my brain will also not get over worked. With the energy that I conserve, I may actually figure out even better solutions.

Is this too much of a fancy. I don’t know. Let me put it in action and see. I will keep you posted.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!