Greg's Right FIT #524 – This week: Persuading, Thinking, Broncos

Quick notes to help you find new business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

• Thoughts on Persuading
• Being Human
• Random Stuff

Thoughts on Persuading

• What makes one person more persuasive than another in a situation depends on circumstance and timing. What makes them more persuasive over time depends more on behavior, tactics, and technique. Remember this when interviewing sellers. Look for the behaviors you want beyond great interviewing technique.
• Your best sellers know that their prospects want to know who else is using your firm and what their results are. Social proof is a shortcut to making good decisions. Getting social proof is more than a tactic for persuading prospects. It's something your sellers need for motivation. Mr. Carl used to say, "the first sale is to yourself," and it's true.
• Questions are more persuasive than declarations. Think about it from the prospect's point of view. Hearing a salesperson say, "This is great," isn't believable. Hearing yourself say, "This is great," well, now that's just the truth, isn't it?
• The most persuasive technique I can offer a startup is to make it easy for the prospect to take action. The easier you are to work with, the more likely you are to win the business. It was true when I sold software, when I sold shirts, and still holds true selling services. Make it easy to build momentum.

Being Human – Thinking

“We couldn’t survive as a people if we were always confined to one ship or one world.” ― science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler in Dawn

I had a fun tete-a-tete with a fellow consultant about the usefulness of tools like ChatGPT and Claude. We agreed that the tools were not saving either of us much time in our work. We couldn't agree on whether or not our experience was representative of the whole. I come down on the side of the tools not surviving in their current form. He thinks 200-300 million daily users is proof enough that I don't know what I am talking about. Time will tell us who is gets closer to the truth.

We both agreed on one thing: these tools are interrupting thought/thinking, especially in young people, but just as much in the olds.

I watched a series on Nature called Human by paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi. She walks viewers through the evolution of homo sapiens and how we came to be the dominant species on the planet. It's mind bending stuff, and I walked away thinking about thinking. To be human is to do this crazy bit of processing of the outside world in our brains and bodies that no other species does. I'm seeing bits of it in real-time when I spend time with my grandson. His ability to process his environment and manipulate the humans around him grows by multiples each time I see him. It's amazing.

What will these new tools do for him and his thinking process? ChatGPT suggests they'll give him direction to accomplish all sorts of things, but we humans seem to be made up as much from accidents as specific goals. Will these tools evolve to help us find more accidents to propel us forward, or will they shortcut our thinking and lead us to hive-mind?

Who knows? My friend and I were unable to persuade one another of the ultimate outcome of LLMs in business or our personal lives. We did agree that our species has come a long way from scratching out glyphs in caves. (Even if a lot of the 200 million daily users are only using these modern miracles of technology to see what people might look like naked.)

Random Stuff

“Let’s go out there and play 60 minutes of Broncos football and we’ll come out champs!” – said by Broncos legend John Elway Super Bowl pre-game 1997, maybe

This weekend my childhood sports team, the Denver Broncos, are hosting a playoff game. It's been 5o years since this football team first entered my consciousness but in that time they're success or failure has had a deep effect on my mood. Orange Sunday, Blue Monday as the saying goes.

My earliest memory of the Broncos is when my parents hosted a Super Bowl party. The kids were relegated to the basement. There were maybe a dozen of us. (Jenny, Kevin, Gary, Heather, Holly, and Kelly come to mind, maybe Brett but I think he was a baby then.) I remember playing hide and seek, I remember the adults yelling about the game (which Dallas fans will remember as a Bronco loss), I remember the smell of Coors beer, and I remember getting in trouble. Not for the broken ping pong table, but for another thing.

The basement had a bar. I don't remember if there was liquor in it. I assume most of the contents were upstairs with the adults, but it held other bar related accoutrements, like coasters, swizzle sticks, playing cards, and matches. The latter is what got me in trouble.

I think I learned the trick from my cousin Sonny. He was from El Paso, but drove through Denver a few times and stayed at our house. He was maybe 17 years older than me, drove an early 70's Datsun 240Z, and was the coolest person I ever met. He could make coins disappear and find them behind my ear. He taught me how to play ping pong, and he showed me how to put matches out with my finger tips.

This last trick was what I taught to the basement crew. We must have lit and put out two matchbooks worth of matches. My technique was flawless but the others ended up with burns and blistered fingertips. The injuries didn't show up right away, but as everyone was gathering to leave the truth came out. The adults were in a piss-poor mood after the loss, and my little kid guests started complaining about their swollen, blistered fingers. I knew it was bad and I had to get out of there, but where was an eight year old to go? I was busted. I cried. It made an impression. I've never put a match or candle flame out that way again.

Spare a thought for my favorite sports team this weekend. Win or lose, I'll feel it on Sunday, deep in my bones. I can't help it. It's in me.