Successful Blog

What Customers Already Know about Influence and Loyalty

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Time is the New Money: 7 Crucial Truths for 2012

The silos of thinking that made our processes work were great when we were building assembly lines and factories. The spreadsheets of data that sorted our thinking were fine when we were counting dollars and doughnuts and things that didn’t think too. Fear of change, love of past success, bias that interprets history in our favor leads us to repeat and re-imprint bad or outdated behaviors in our organizational brains.

But when it came to predicting human behavior, teaching and training leaders, or bringing together teams in collaboration,

Big data has crashed through the halls of our silos.

Now through weird combinations of buying habits Target decides that we’re pregnant. For as much as they’re right, they’re wrong too. Just ask my friend who isn’t pregnant who’s getting samples from Similac.

Why don’t they just ask if it’s true? We talk to people who ask us more than we talk to people who tell us.

Find out about Influence and Loyalty

Once in the world of broadcasting, companies could control the conversation. Is it that habit of controling that keeps them secretive about asking?

The older, the larger that business has grown the harder achieving that new culture must be;
that is … they have more past success, more to lose, more to fear, fewer models of trust and collaboration.

Yet the business that will win my trust and gain my influence will be a role model, leader, learner, teacher, guide to the use of its product or service. If you want your company to embrace the social web, champion these ten roles as an action plan …

    It’s important that we recognize that customers already know …

    • Influence is more than moving people to click on an add or retweet an offer. We might do those. We might even write a blog post. Hand us a free phone and we might use it, but that doesn’t mean will carry your banner of influence.

      Want me to tell my friends about you, evangelize and spread the word to others who I hardly know? You have to be even better than your product. Understand what it means for me to put my seal on your product. I have to trust that it won’t show up broken, or break when someone first uses it. I have to know that my good experience wasn’t just a fluke. I want to know that you weren’t only extremely to me, but that you’re extremely professional to everybody.

    • Loyalty is a relationship based in trust. Lasting loyalty isn’t tied to price, points, or other forms of bribery.
      The “tools of social media and social networking” are as important, but not more important than other social tools and venues through history, such as cave paintings, paper and pencil (or crayons), print communication, the telephone, radio, television, the neighborhood bar. Loyalty is a belief that you’ll be there and be the same person even when I’m not around to see you.

    We are influenced by our friends because they are predictable. We know which ones always buy the first of everything and which buy after the sell-by date. We don’t follow the fickle ones blindly. We don’t follow the judgmental ones to places where we disagree.

    And we don’t follow people who tell us what to think without finding out who we are.

    Just yesterday, I heard someone who spends no time online talk about “companies that don’t ‘get’ it.” What she meant is that her favorite store changed a policy in a way that served themselves not their customer.

    What customers know about influence and loyalty is that we don’t like companies who are selfish.

    Are you sure you’re serving your customers?

    –ME “Liz” Strauss
    Work with Liz on your business!!

Use the Psychology of Focus to Get More Done

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Beware the Illusion of Multitasking

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Have you ever had one of those days when you felt like you achieved a lot of things, but when you thought about it before a good night’s sleep, you found you’ve actually achieved nothing?

That is the illusion of multitasking.

Or as Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University once said, “Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident of their abilities, but there’s evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people.”

And he’s not alone with his opinion. Various psychological studies have since found that multitasking comes with a host of side-effect, which includes everything from dampened creativity to lower IQ, and ironically, decreased productivity.

In fact, studies have shown that your brain can really only handle one task at a time, and even though it only takes one-tenths of a second to switch from one task to another, these “little” delays can add up and account for as much as 40% of a person’s productive time. And that’s not even including the 15 minutes it takes, on average, for people to get back “in the flow”.

So you want to multiply your productivity and grow your business? The answer is simple: focus.

Optimizing Your Work Space

Most people think focus is an issue of “willpower”. That if you just “try to focus more”, the problem would go away. I believe the inability to focus are really two problems: a lack of willpower and an abundance of negative triggers.

Before I go on, let’s get one thing straight: willpower is a limited resource. It’s not a motivational issue. It’s a capability issue. Studies have shown that if you spend your willpower resisting a piece of cookie, for example, you’ll spend less time trying to solve a complex puzzle later.

Willpower can grow, just like a muscle can get stronger, but there’s always a limit. It is a resource that should be managed like time and money. When we run out of willpower, we need to take a break. And because focus takes willpower, I believe multitasking, therefore, is a form of “mental break”.

So my approach to focus is twofold: increase willpower and conserving it. The first approach — willpower — is not only widely discussed, it’s also a painful process. I won’t go through it in this article.

The cleverer approach is to cut down on the distractions that drain your willpower. And one of the biggest drains of willpower are triggers. What are triggers?

According to BJ Fogg, founder of Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, three things must converge at the same time for a particular behaviour to take place: motivation, ability and trigger.

So according to Fogg, if you want to stop multitasking, you can try to change your motivation (difficult, in my experience) or you can hamper your ability (eg: hire a supervisor to stand over your shoulder). None of which are ideal, of course.

The last, and in my opinion, the easiest way to avoid multitasking is to simply get rid of triggers. Triggers are reminders for you to multitask. They are like temptations.

So for example, if you’re working on this report and Outlook pops up saying you have a new email… guess what you’ll do? That’s right, you’ll immediately check out the email. The same is true with any other alerts and notices.

Other common triggers include:

  1. Advertisements. Have you ever surfed the web for research but clicked through an ad and as a result, abandoned what you were doing? Enough said.
  2. The people around you. I used to work from home and one of the biggest triggers for multitasking at the time was my wife – once in a while she would ask me to check her email, or come into the room with a plate of food (it was a loving gesture, but that doesn’t make it OK!)

In your case, the trigger maybe the colleague who keeps dropping by, asking if “you have a minute”. Or perhaps it’s your boss always looking over your shoulder.

Mental Drains

Other than triggers, here are two more common mental-drains:

  1. Noise. Try this: Close your eyes and just listen. Can you hear your computer buzzing? How about the air conditioner humming? Maybe it’s traffic speeding by?

    These background noises have been shown to lower willpower and discipline, even if the subjects didn’t perceive stress from them. And as we now know, as your willpower drains, you begin to multitask.

  2. This one is the least talked-about mental-drain: functional control of your working environment. Functional control means you have to be able to adjust anything you want in your working space, things like the temperature, where you sit, what’s on your desk, brightness, etc.

    Functional control not only gives you physical comfort, it also give you psychological comfort. The fact that you can control the space gives you a sense of territoriality and safe space. It’s the difference between working in a strange environment and a place you’re familiar with.

    Now some entrepreneurs I know of are perfectly comfortable working in a cafe, but most of us just couldn’t handle the lack of functional control. The fact that there are strangers around you all the time puts most of us on edge.

So there, 4 easy ways to conserve your willpower and focus more. Do you have any tips? I’d love to hear them in the comments.

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Author’s Bio:
Andrianes Pinantoan is part of the team behind Open Colleges, an accredited business management courses provider. You can follow him @andreispsyched.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Influencing Decisions – Part 2: 4 Things to Let Someone Know Before You Ask

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IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Influencing Decisions

Not Everyone Has the Context You Do

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A few days ago I got another phone call from a person I met several months ago. He said his name and then said,
I’m launching a new product and I’m wondering if you’d like to see a demo.

“What?” was all that I could think of to say.

When he’d called, I’d been knee deep in writing a proposal. I was well into the context of the strategy I was developing and that strategy had no connection to the name or the random question that had just interrupted it.

After an uncomfortable few minutes of asking questions of my own, I managed to find out who the person was and why he was calling me — he wanted to enlist my help. After all, we were connected.

The disconnect in this “connected” thinking is that I can’t help everyone with whom I have a conversation, much as I might be inclined to be the helpful one. My life, my family, my friends, and my landlord demand their own part and parcel of my time. So I can’t stop my own goals to pursue others’ quests just because they ask.

No one can.

It’s hard enough for any one of us to determine where to lend our support to the most noble of quests within the time we have in our lives.

If you’ve got a quest that needs support, help yourself and the people you might ask by being able to tell us the information we might need to make that decision before you ask.

4 Things to Tell Before You Ask

  1. Lead with relationship and context. Let me know who you are. Your ask or offer will get turned down if it’s bigger than the trust in the relationship. Set the context for your conversation by establishing what that relationship is and why that trust exists. How do I know you? Why are you an expert at what you’re about share?
  2. Be clear on what you have. Let me know what your quest is. Tell me what exactly you’re talking about. be able to say it in 25 words or less. If you still need paragraphs of detail, you don’t know what it is.
  3. Connect your me to your quest. Let me know why you’re asking ME and not every turnip that that falls off the truck. Tell me why you’re asking me — why you believe my expertise will be a valued contribution to your success. That will pique my interest in your quest. If you’re asking everyone, you haven’t considered what any one person might offer and that anyone can do what you ask.
  4. Make helping easy, fast, and meaningful. Let me know how little I have to do to help. the facts. Don’t tell me about your disappointments. Think of what I might expect the product to be and then make sure I know if something in that definition is missing.

Anyone with more than one friend has to find a way to decide which friends to help and when. When you move beyond close connections, it sure helps if the “friends” asking lets us know that they’ve thought enough about their quest to start with trust.

Asking isn’t easy. Saying “no,” isn’t either. But time is the only resource no one has enough of.

Take the time to understand and prepare for the four points above and you’ll save time because you’ll contacting the right people with the information that they need to answer faster with a yes.

How do you make sure you’re ready to ask?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Beach Notes: Change of Routine Brings Rainbows

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

Rainbow Bay Beach

Last Saturday we went for an afternoon walk at Coolangatta Beach as out morning walk at Rainbow Bay Beach had been cut short by rain. As we were walking along I saw a rainbow emerging from the horizon, I shouted out to Des: “look a rainbow”. What was amazing was it was like a ball.

We then watched as the rainbow formed into an arc. Sometimes it is good to change your routine, you never know what you will learn or see.

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

Thanks to Week 340 SOBs

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Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

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They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

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Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Do You Manage the Objectives of Project Management?

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Focusing …

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What are the main objectives of project management?

Simply put, project management simply means the planning, organisation and management of the resources necessary to bring about a successful conclusion to a specific task (‘deliverable’), or group of tasks. There are numerous software packages available setting out detailed methodologies and providing project management training for managers who are new to the role.

Project objectives define a project. Projects by their very nature dictate that a number of different parties are involved in completing the various elements of the project and it is vital that all those participating are totally clear on what the final deliverable is, and what the staged objectives to achieve that deliverable are. It is the overall project manager’s job to draw together each of the separate strands of work, on time and on budget and oversee the project to a successful conclusion where the deliverables are presented to the client as agreed at the project outset. In the case of large projects where multiple teams are assembled, some project management training may be required by less experienced project team leaders and this may take place either prior to the project commencing or ‘on the job’ as a learning curve.

There are three primary elements which make up the basic project objectives to be realised.

  1. Firstly, a ‘drop dead date’, or completion date by which the final deliverable must be achieved, must be agreed and recorded in the project plan. A series of milestone dates should then be applied to the project plan by which the various smaller tasks must be completed to keep the overall plan on schedule. It is important to incorporate short periods of ‘slippage’ into the project plan around the tasks most likely to be delayed and it is the project manager’s responsibility to identify such tasks and accurately estimate the amount of slippage to be allowed for. Clearly, one of the key skills of the effective project manager is time management, both his own and that of his team.
  2. Project costing must also be explored and integrated into the overall plan. The financial aspect of costs will be recorded in a separate budget spread sheet. It is extremely important that the financials are projected as accurately as possible and are monitored closely as the various stages of the project are completed. Other costs are measured in terms of the personnel who make up the project team, third party suppliers who will be required to make a contribution at certain stages and equipment or materials required depending upon the nature of the final deliverable.
  3. The final main project objective is the quality of the final deliverable. This must be to a standard acceptable to and agreed with the project sponsor and client. Most contractual agreements between the project sponsor and client will have a clause dictating that a forfeit will be levied should the project fail to be produced on time, on budget and to the required standard.

Know your objectives and you’ll be able to report with clarity. Your role will be mission critical in keeping everyone aware of how the project is progessing and how to keep it on track.

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Author Bio

Blathnaid Magill has an MBS in Electronic Business from University College Cork, Ireland. She enjoys writing about software and technology. She is currently writing on behalf of QA, who are the leading providers in Project Management Training.

Thank you, Blathnaid!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!