I love listening to audiobooks while I drive between sales calls. The books I love best are the ones that inspire me to do better and achieve better.
They are entertaining and they work to change my mindset about how I work so that I can work smarter and get better results.
It got me thinking…how can I make my sales calls more inspiring. I want my sales call to be
– More entertaining
– More inspiring
– Give my customers the motivation and ability to achieve more
To me that doesn’t mean throwing out the messaging that the market so needs to hear, or even changing it. The message is still the same but it just needs to be delivered in a better way.
Today I began using more enthusiasm in my voice, began painting a clearer picture with clearer action steps to achieve success. I cut out a lot of words and sentences and tried to get the message across as succinctly as possible.
Have I perfected my messaging? No
Do I still have a lot of work to do? Yes
Am I engaging with customers better? Yes
Am I enjoying my day and bringing more enthusiasm to my sales calls? Most definitely
I believe the end result will be happier more engaged customers and better results both for my customer base and my company.
Seth Godin’s book “Meatball Sundae” talks about the fact that business models only tend to succeed when they are organized around the marketing channels available.
With the introduction of the Internet, the growth of social media and the decline of TV advertising and mass media the marketing landscape is changing.
The church as it exists today (I believe) is organized around a previous form of getting the word out (marketing). We congregate as a big group as that was the only way to get lots of people to hear about the bible and to engage with other Christians.
The Internet has changed all that.
I can listen to preaching in my car (free podcasts) and I spend more time engaging with people online.
Most of the people at church I can’t hold a solid conversation with because we are so different. So I hang out with the “young couples with kids” group that we have created within the church and I check to see what they have put on instagram during the service.
What if you didn’t try to just incorporate social media into the current church but made the entire church a way to get people to engage in social media?
What if the point of a sermon was to get people online tweeting or commenting and adding their thoughts or asking their questions? How would you preach differently?
What if we spent less time focusing on the “Sunday service” and more time creating a place online for people to connect and communicate.
Online you could provide:
– Video lessons for new Christians
– A way for amateur musicians to share their music with Christians and for people to find new worship music
– A place for people to interact
– A directory of ways to serve the community
The Sunday sermon would then exist to give people a reason to interact, rather than to get a message across.
Because let’s face it, people might not create the best interactions without some common thing to discuss.
Brochures would include links to websites and QR codes. Preaching would include live questions or comments from Twitter. New talent would surface more easily as people are given an online podium to talk to people.
The church might even become more empowered.
This could be a crazy idea, but it might take me 1,000 crazy ideas before I get a good one…so I’m just trying to get as many ideas as possible.
It’s easy to sit back and criticize the work other people have done. Much harder to actually do something that will be criticized.
Doing is hard. I want to…no I need to…do more. I need to stand up and create things that can be criticized.
If you want to have a good idea, have a lot of bad ones and a good one is bound to come out.
This weekend I have had an entire sense of “overwhelm”.
Maybe it is the thought of getting back into work, maybe it the the looming year ahead, maybe it is the dreams and ambitions I have for my life.
When I feel overwhelmed I love to take the “just do something” approach.
If the house is a pigsty and I feel completely overwhelmed I start by just picking something up. It doesn’t matter what, you just have to do something.
That item then leads you to another item, which leads you the do washing in the kitchen and picking up the diplomatic and making the bed.
Taking that same approach to other aspects of my life usually works to. Answer an email, plan your day, make a call, write a blog post…just start with something.