Greg's Right FIT #458

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

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Proposals
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Proposals

• Does your proposal lead with an About Us? Change it to About Them and see what happens. 
• Proposals should help prospects determine Return on Investment (ROI). It's a problem when the only numbers in the proposal are the Investment. As you know, an investment without return is a cost. And the cost is always too high. 
• If you're using Chat GPT for proposals, you need to give it the About Them information. Most proposals the robot learned from skim that key bit of information.
• When your people are laboring over a proposal, remind them it's a summary of the sales process, not a time to introduce new material. If new information needs to be introduced, get in front of prospects and check for relevance before putting it in the proposal.

Being Human - Message delivered, message received

"Easy, huh? Hell, I don't know that it was all that easy even back then. And we was young and full of beans." – Ned in "Unforgiven"

I am listening to an interview with a comedian when he says a good joke relies on the audience sharing the same background or knowledge. There needs to be a common understanding between the two for the joke to make sense. Yuval Noah Harari's book "Sapiens," went further in suggesting our success as a species is rooted in this ability to share information and coordinate. 

In my talks I use a bastardization of the linguist's concept of Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP) to make a similar point. When two parties have a lot in common, communication is easier, so define terms. 

All this made me think of William Munny of Missouri, the character from the movie, "Unforgiven." 

"It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have."

The outlaw killer with deep insights. All of your potential commonalities go away when William Munny shoots you. No chance of further communication.

To get your message across, find the commonalities. If you're not sure where the commonalities are, tell your audience what's going on and where you're coming from. Be curious about them. If you don't take the time to establish a CUP, bad things happen. 

As Munny might say, "it's a hell of a thing making assumptions. Take away all chance of understanding and any chance it's ever gonna progress."

Check for understanding before moving to a proposal. It will save you time and shorten your sales cycles.
 

Random Stuff

“Well, I really always wanted to be quite famous, but I don't want to be on your cameras, I don't want to be on your video cameras Mr. Policeman." – Billy Bragg, bootleg of "Great Leap Forward"

There's an anxiety that comes with walking into a room of complete strangers and making small talk. If you know who will be at the event, it's not uncommon to overcome this with a little creeping on Google and social media. "I'll be talking to Greg Chambers? Who is he? What's on the interwebs about this character?" 

But what if you don't have any advance info? Would you be interested in Zuckerberg's Meta glasses telling you things about who you're talking to? 

My friend Mark Hurst has been sounding the alarm about data privacy for years. His latest newsletter shows what a few student engineers cobbled together with Meta's Smart Glasses. You can watch the video here:

https://x.com/AnhPhuNguyen1/status/1840786336992682409

Salespeople are instantly like, "ooh! I need that!" 

Unfortunately, the bad guys will be the first to get an ROI. Grandma's Facebook account to keep track of her grandkids contains enough information to make scamming easier. Stalkers will love the time saved when obsessing over new victims. Some members of law enforcement will enjoy the ease of profiling.

Wait, you say, what if I don't want any of that? What if I like my relative anonymity?

Privacy is a luxury, nowadays. While billionaires may have the resources to live undetected (Estate Enigma: The mystery of the dead billionaire), and database builders don't care about the very poor, the rest of us have some work to do to escape the robots building a Common Underlying Proficiency between all of us. 

I guess I need to send the video of I-Xray to my congressional reps. I'm sure they'll get right on it. 

There may be an upside. Grindr has an "AI Wingman" in the works. An "AI bot . . . scout for long-term relationship prospects, set up dates—and even date other wingmen for you." Instant CUP, I guess.

It's not all bad news.

I suppose when they make the sales prospecting version that lets seller-wingmen talk to buyer-wingmen it will free up time. I can finally watch the dozens of shows I'm missing on my thirteen streaming services. There's that to look forward to.