Greg's Right FIT #440

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Patience
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Patience

• Personal financial bench strength in your salespeople keeps sales activity going. It helps your people make the right decisions in the moment. It gives them the patience to stick to the process, regardless of short-term pressures.
• Ben Franklin said, "Energy and persistence conquer all things. He that can have patience, can have what he will. 
  Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that happen every day." Good stuff.
• Take action, but be patient with results. Developing new clients relies on any number of events and decisions taking place. Believe in action, but tie it to patience.
• Finding the right way to market a new product or service is a challenge. It requires numerous pivots and backtracking. For this reason, having the right people in this role is imperative. Look for curiosity and abundant patience in teammates.

Being Human - Time frames

News: JLL Serve digitally transforms facilities and lifecycle asset management with AI-powered technology from Sclera

Sometimes things work out

In my latest book I talk about the importance of clear company vision to sales momentum. In the section Company Vision Communication, to illustrate how to do it, I used some work I did with Vikram Hedge's team at Sclera. The same Sclera that just inked a big agreement with property giant, JLL. The same company, I might add, Vikram brought me in to help with, all those years ago. 

In the book I give a 3-part shortcut for talking about vision, then use Sclera's story to help explain how a clear vision sounds. 

A client of mine launching a new product went through this exact exercise for his leadership team. Vikram Hegde has built a device for the world’s largest hotel chains that helps their managers manage any connected device in their buildings. His answers are useful in learning what I think you should be listening for.

Sclera’s new device tracks other devices. It’s a complicated service, but for his intended market, hotel chains, it’s a very valuable one. There’s nothing worse than checking into a hotel and upon getting to your room finding out the Wi-Fi or the heating/air conditioning or the TV doesn’t work. Vikram’s team figured out a way to let the management team know what’s working and what’s not, minutes before the guest does, improving the customer’s experience. We spent some time working through their vision, and once we worked the answers out, we used it for recruiting new team members, keeping the product development team on target, and even in our presentations to the giant hotel brands they are targeting. This is what we worked out:

For question 1 Sclera’s leadership team will answer, “In the next five to seven years, the world will have more, not fewer, Internet of Things (IoT) devices. McKinsey projects going from 1 billion devices currently to over 100 billion devices in this time.”

For question 2 Sclera’s leadership team will answer, “Knowing this, we expect our customers to not only depend on more and more devices to service their customers, we expect they will demand these devices work better and are easier to use than ever before.”

For question 3 Sclera’s leadership team will answer, “To provide value to our customers, our company will design solutions that make using these devices to provide world-class customer service as easy as glancing at a map. Making technology simple so our customers can focus on their customers.”

That’s it. You see what I mean by it being too broad to be anything more than a direction? Their sales team can listen for opportunities to uncover value anytime they hear about a connected device malfunction impacting a customer’s experience. This is what you’re after.

Interesting, right? 

The most interesting thing about the story is how hard Vikram and his team worked to get into JLL back in 2021. Lots of talks, lots of preparations, some big presentations, and then nothing. A company defining deal died on the vine. 

Everyone had an opinion. You only get one shot. It was too soon. It was the wrong approach. Etc. Etc. 

I stood firm in my opinion that we did the best we could with what we had. The deal wasn't dead, it's just that sometimes our time frame isn't the client's time frame. It's that simple. 

Random Stuff

Just noticed my book, "The Human Being's Guide to Business Growth" is on sale on Amazon for $10.79! Seems like a bargain.

On occasion someone will tell me I should put these newsletter entries in book form. One person even wanted me to make the Thoughts section into a calendar! Most say the Random Stuff section is worthy of being bound. 

I've started it. 

There are over 400 stories to be sorted, re-read, re-written, and put in an appealing format. I thought, "finally, a perfect task for an LLM AI." I started with the Thoughts section since those are short sentences and easier to work with. I put them into the chatbot and said, "sort these into themes and output in Excel." Click, whir, beep, boop. "Done. There are 10 clusters. . ." and it lists them.

Seems impressive and they look pretty good. But the categories aren't what I asked for. I needed it sorted. "Can you put each one into the right section?" Click, whir, beep, boop. "Done, there are 1600 statements across 15 clusters and the largest contains 458. . ."

15 now? Still no output. C'mon man. "Give me the output." Click, whir, beep, bloop. "Done. Click to download."

1600 rows. All of them repeating the first entry. "Schedule your day around just a few priorities. Get them done and move on with a sense of accomplishment." 

I try a few more times. I say please. Even offer to tip. Click, whir, bleep, bloop. Click, click, whir, whir, beep, beep, bloop, bloop. Each answer is worse than the last, all prefaced by, "Yes, I can help. . ."

The CEO of Y-Combinator said current LLM chatbot are like an overconfident confident intern with an 85 IQ. Seems about right. 

I'll keep you posted on my progress. We'll happily call it "handcrafted" when it comes out. 

Enjoy the weekend!