What I learnt from Amanda Palmer’s Ted Talk

Long after I delivered my talk on “Psychology and Science of selling” various issues are still ringing in my head. While watching this Ted Talk by Amanda Palmer I could instantly connect it with the job of a sales person.

I didn’t know about Amanda Palmer till I watched the Ted Talks and then I briefly read about her.

Her Ted Talk about ‘The art of Asking’ took me back to my thoughts on ‘Psychology and Science of selling’.  I wanted to address the question on why people are afraid of selling, what are those fears and how can I help people become better at sales. Among the things that I had heard from people who are afraid of selling was this huge resistance to ‘asking something’ from people.

I could instantly connect with Amanda’s view that if we ask we get it. I realized how effectively she has leveraged crowdsourcing. How she is able to organize gigs in less than 24 hours ( read about it on her blog here) just by asking.

It is so important in sales role to be asking – asking for information, asking for purchase order, asking for referrals.  At the same time we have to approach it very confidently. We need to remove the notion that asking is akin to begging. We need to be clear that we are also giving something in return so it is absolutely fair – the point Amanda has highlighted in her experience with the family in Miami neighborhood. Same thing in sales cycle – as a sales person we are brining something valuable to the table and we are asking their money in return, so it is absolutely a fair thing to do.

I found people are more comfortable when they have this feeling of ‘giving’ (at least in Asian culture). We need to realized that sales is not just about asking we are also giving something in return but unless we ask we will not get an opportunity to ‘give’.

Why it is so difficult to measure the impact of social media

My interest in social media and its impact on business has led me to dabble into social media for a fair amount of time. It is quite a new medium but has made significant impact on businesses, politics, opinion making, brands and what not. I consider the channels like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Pinterest, blogging, Youtube, Slideshare, Instagram as form of social media tools. There are many more being added.

However there is a great deal of debate happening among the marketers about measurement of its impact on business – sales, revenue etc.; for example  this  article in HBR .

“If you think pageviews, unique visitors, registered members, conversion rates, email-newsletter open rates, number of Twitter followers, or Facebook likes are important by themselves, you probably have no idea what you’re doing. Those metrics are the most common false idols of analytics.”….

Likewise there are many views about which metrices are right or wrong.

In my opinion, social media is one of the channels of reaching out to the customers. Depending on what you are offering you can leverage this channel to achieve any or all of the objectives, namely : direct sales, message dissemination, improve speed of communication, brand enhancement, reputation management, create engagement etc. Eg.Personalities, political parties, social activists, news channels are using Twitter for giving out information/ opinion; restaurants, consumer goods are using Facebook to reach out with promotions.

We need to make use of the social media and its impact in the similar way as we use AAA approach – Awareness, Appreciation and Adoption cycle. But social media has added few additional dimensions that makes it interesting to use for direct engagement (not just communication) with the stakeholders at lower cost, provide response and enable experimentation with offerings at more targeted audience in less time. There are many examples of brands, personalities, services that have leveraged the media successfully. Business like  restaurants, shoe brands etc are able to get their audience’s opinion, create offering suited to range of audience or even let their audience create an offering based on their products ( eg. paintings / hand decoration using their material).

Thus every business has to create its own metrics depending on what it expect from social media in the given period of time. We work with our clients by first talking about business objectives and challenges they are facing in growing the business. Then we identify who are potential customers ( are they new ones or we need to tap into new ones). Then map them where these potential customers are spending more time ( which social media). And make a plan to reach out to them.  Based on that we create a metrics for different phases of time.

There are no right or wrong rules. Unless you take a plunge you can not experience it and hence can not correct it. If you are a newcomer at trying out social media do your basic home work and get going.

2 technologies that are shaping business transformation

I wrote this blog first for my company’s website.

We all know how IT has become center stage of business transformation in last few years. It has its own challenges that are unique and at the same time has opened up new opportunities.

The senior IT executives have to deal with operational and strategic level challenges all the time.  On one hand there are project delivery, cost management, resource management, vendor management issues on the other hand there are other strategic challenges such as aligning IT to business needs, creating a roadmap for business transformation through IT, keep pace with new technologies and protect the bottom line while doing all the above.

Being in the IT industry for more than 22 years, I am able to understand how challenging it is to satisfy the constant demands from businesses.

I just wanted to share with you two trends that I foresee would be the foundation of enterprise computing (that would replace traditional IT ) and how we can help you.

Open source is one of the key technologies that has shaped the enterprise IT and now shaping the consumer IT. Actually with BYOD kind of trends, the consumer and enterprise IT is converging. I do not have to tell you how Linux, middleware such as JBoss, database such as PostgreSQL have come to become trusted technologies in large enterprises. The major stock exchanges, telecom companies, banks and technologies companies such as Google, Facebook, Salesforce etc, have embraced open source technologies to drive business needs.

We certainly see the bright ‘clouds’ on the horizons, as a new technology that we think would shape the coming few years of IT and business. Cloud computing does not mean putting everything on the public cloud. We certainly see big merits in bringing the cloud computing as a way of managing IT infrastructure inside your data centre. The agility, flexibility and scalability (both – up and down) this model brings, is what all the CIOs and CEOs have been looking for.

We, as a boutique consulting company are specialized in helping companies bring about business transformation by use of open source and cloud computing technologies.

Capability and Capacity

When I was discussing the challenges of growing our business and hiring people, I said that our priority was to build the capability first and we can build the capacity later on. When I thought about this statement more, I realised that many organisations go through this challenge. Very often we have to take decision about hiring people in a given budget.

For example, the question that I was trying to address was whether to hire 2 people at entry level skills versus hire only 1 at an expert level.

With 2 people, it lowers our risk of failure (seemingly), it also allows us to regulate the cash flow.

On the other hand hiring one expert and having a cash outflow equivalent of two, increases the risks, if things don’t work out.

However the key question for me was more about capability vs. capacity. 1 expert gives us capability and 2 entry level skills gives us capacity. Based on the current needs I decided to go for ‘capability’ building.

Why I am happy to see ‘Twitter Drops Linkedin Partnership’

When I read above news, first thing that I came to my mind was ‘Ah! I would not be seeing Tweets on Linkedin stream’.

Frankly I really get irritated when people spam Linkedin, Facebook networks through their tweets.

First of all it is due to the fact that ‘tweets’ on Linkedin don’t have a neat look and feel. They look so alien with a short URL, few words and picture of tweet preceding it. It doesn’t look authentic ‘Linkedin’ experience.

Secondly, it also gives me a feeling that person is not genuinely interested in sharing the information with Linkedin users, but is simply interesting in ‘showing’ his so called ‘contribution to sharing’.

My view is that, if you really want to engage with your audience, really want to share the news, you should take some efforts in populating that particular social network in its native form.

In our real social networks we have different ’networks’ of friends/relatives/colleagues etc. We treat each of them separately. When we share information with each ‘network’ we do it in a distinct way. Same should be applied on Virtual Social Networks (VSN) – Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook etc. If these VSNs are manifestation of our real social life, then we should treat each of them separately.

Social media shaping our lives?

For most people including the marketeers, social media is a form of technology which maps our behaviour into digital world. Actually this is how the entire automation or for that matter the computerization has started. We first tried to automate the routine work with the help of machines then we made them little intelligent by adding ‘CPU’ or brainpower. Think of machines – typewriters then word-processors on the computers or calculators and then spreadsheets. Think of the early use of computers for payroll etc. Essentially we were asking the machines to do our work. Most people ( who are 35 and above today) have to come to think of computers, internet as a way to map our tasks – personal work and office work in the internet world.

But social media such as Facebook or Twitter or Google hangout or Linkedin are proving to be much more than manifestation of our lives in the digital world. Though the founder’s of these companies might not have started with the grand vision and great psychological studies or with the intentions of changing the people behaviour, but these tools are precisely doing that – they are taking us into an era where our social behaviour is being shaped by them. Here are sample examples why I think it is happening :

Definition of friends : We all value number of likes and comments to our posts by our friends. We engage and connect with the people with whom we did not have in-depth relationships in real life. But we value their comments, we establish some bonds with them. With more and more people being on-line, the way new generation would think of ‘friends’ is entirely going to change. There are going to be more online friends than real life ones and they are the ones who are going to be more influential.  These influences would not have cultural boundaries. This wold lead to the behaviour patterns that have no historical pattern that can be studied. It is all going to be very new.

‘Hanging out’ : With the video chats and ‘hangout’ types tools becoming common coupled with online games becoming more interactive where do you think people are going to spend time on? What is going to shape their minds?

Learning process : We used to think sending to school was enough for the children to get knowledge and information. To give them something extra there were libraries. In a way, it was a linear process, there were defined ways of acquiring the knowledge. Now we want children to be all rounded at an early age and are exposing them, at times pushing them, to many sources of information – schools, tuition, classes, workshops, camps and online assignments. If that is not enough they are expected to understand the latest developments in each fields while learning the basics. For example we teach them ( in the schools) sound waves, light waves, fundamentals of electromagnetic theory, atomic structure etc and then we want them to know about the latest developments in satellite communication, nano technology, super computers etc.Essentially we want to shorten the learning cycle by pointing to the resources available online. Obviously they get pushed to spend more time going through internet and all these social resources.

The entire social media is going to acquire its own form, without we noticing it. The minds, culture, behaviour, societies and nations are  going to be shaped by what people get exposed on the social networks. Are we ready to embrace it?

Note : I have made the image by combining three different pictures available on various sites.

Ego and Fear : two sides of same coin

What we call as fear, is actually our ego that comes in our way.

Just think of it. Many times we stop ourselves from doing something. eg. trying out new outfit, trying to learn new skills in the classes, trying to pick up conversation with strangers, going to new places etc.. the list is long. We call it as our fear. We feel its ok to tell people “I am afraid of picking conversation with new people” or ” I am afraid of going to music class”. We even say ” I don’t know if I would be able to do it”, “People will laugh at me”.

On the face of it all of these excuses look like ‘being afraid of’ syndrome.

But think little deep. Why do we have this fear. What are we afraid of?

We are actually afraid of losing our ‘position’. We think of ourselves as somebody, at some position, in some particular place in the hierarchy. We have reached that position due to our current characteristics. If we have to learn something new, try new outfit, we are looking at ourselves from our ego point of view. We bring the lenses of our position and we don’t want to disturb it. We don’t want to upset the applecart. Why?

Because we think of ourselves as ‘somebody’ at our subconscious level. ( I am not an expert in psychology, these are merely my observations).

Now bring yourself at the ground level. Think you are nobody and you are learning this new skills, trying our new thing for your benefit. You have your strengths but you don’t have to defend your position. Take out your ego and make yourself humble… all your fears would be gone. You would feel free and you will become happier.

Ego comes in way of having peace of mind. At the extreme level when we say ‘ I am afraid of height or of adventure sports, we are actually afraid of death. Why?

If coming in this world was not in our control, death is also not. We have not brought ourselves in this world, ‘someone’ else, then why cling onto the notion of ‘I’?

If we work towards removing ‘I’ from our life, I think, we would become happier.