just a bunch of order takers

We were sitting in a giant horseshoe, apparently the perfect shape for corporate meetings.  O captain my captain was standing at the front of the room and asked us this question:

"I know this is getting a little basic, and it's always good to go over the basics, but what exactly do you guys do?"

People spoke up, "We're problem solvers!", "We discover solutions!", "We give you warm fuzzy feelings", the last one was only said loudly in my mind.

The captain responded "So you guys aren't order takers right!"

Have you ever had somebody walk in the front door of your business, know exactly what they wanted, you provided the service perfectly and both sides exited the sale happy, healthy and likely to work together in the future?

I've had that a couple of times.  It was magical.

Order taking is an art form.  Have you ever had a great waiter?  That is an artisan order taker.  Have you ever worked with a skilled carpenter?  He's not a sculptor creating whatever he wants, he's an artisan order taker.

We have this fawning love affair with sales people, with problem solvers.  The truth is, a salesperson is usually abrasive because they are trying to sell something that is hard to sell or hard to buy.

Apple gets this, when they hire people for the floor in their retail locations they hire teachers, and teachers outsell everybody in that environment.  An environment where you teach me what the device can do and then take my order when I can't wait to own one.

If people are not walking into your business and ordering your product that is not a sales issue, it's an awareness issue, maybe an education issue, possibly it's that your product sucks.

Back when I was at Northwestern Mutual we had a monthly meeting among the sales people called "client builder".  It was great, we would all meet once a month and share what was working and go through our numbers to see where we were falling short.  It was the best sales meetings I've ever attended.

But it was exactly that, a sales meetings.  It was not client building.  The truth is we were selling life insurance, and life insurance is hard to sell and hard to buy.  You need to be a boss freaking sales person.

Nobody wants to buy it because they have to admit their own inevitable death, and everybody has a preconceived notion you are jerk because you sell life insurance.  And it's a complicated product to understand.  And you are paid on commissions which makes you smelly to normal people.

Now, go talk to the number one "sales" person who answers the phone at SelectQuote, the biggest online life insurance sales company, and you will find out that person is a artisan order taker.  They probably calm people down, explain that buying more is actually cheaper than buying less, explain how different terms work and guide people through the order.

But in the rest of the world of financial sales, you really do want your team building clients, not selling.  Clients don't leave, clients don't shop you, you trust your own clients and they trust you.  When the market goes down, you answer their calls.  When they have a child and need more life insurance they answer your call.

There are very few times when a true sales person is needed, not an order taker and not a client builder.  Sales people are hammers, and hammers are critical for a woodworker but only to be used when a hammer is required, every other time they just damage the product.

Hammers help wood understand that they need nails.

I remember asking the number one sales person in our office at Northwestern when he stopped calling people who were either not buying or not returning his phone calls.  I said, do you stop after five calls, after ten calls...  He said he stopped calling them when they yelled at him to stop calling them.

That guy is a hammer, and there are people all over town with hammer marks all over their face from interacting with him.  Maybe that's ok, but I promise that none of the people who were hammered will ever buy from him or probably Northwestern ever again.

If somebody walks into a bank and wants a checking account and leaves with a credit card, a home equity line and a savings account, every sales manager would say that is a win.  But what if they get home, realize they have hammer marks all over them and are afraid to ever go to the bank again or ask a question because they know they are interacting with hammers.

And they will never send over a great referral, a referral that walks in the front door ready to put an order no hammer needed.

Hammers are needed.  Hammers are important.  But would you hire a construction company that had three vans lined up outside your house full of nothing but hammers?

Final side note -

Have you ever been doing a home project and needed a hammer and couldn't find one?  Asking a really good order taker to sell to every client that walks in the front door is like hammering a nail into the wall with a pipe wrench.  It will probably work but you look like an idiot and either the wall or your hand will probably get injured.

My Job's The Worst!

I work for a monster of a company, a fortune 500 behemoth that acts in kind.  It is slow, often ugly and rarely does anything intelligent.  Turnover is far to high, what is agreed upon as achievement is completely changed every six to twelve months.  It is a classic "big box" as I like to call it.

I thoroughly enjoy succeeding at my job.  When I hit my numbers, even numbers that are changing regularly, I feel accomplished.  I show up early to try and keep things orderly, I'm not totally sure but I think I care.  And yet, more days than not, it feels as if the company is actually against my success.  That the way we operate encourages me to do less, not more.

The more success I have the more dysfunction and pain I invite into my life.

It is so easy to sit with a co-worker and rip the company apart, because it is obvious and true.

However, it does make me think of one of my favorite jokes.

Two men are walking down the street, a beggar stops them and asks for money.  One of the men hands him a dollar and they continue walking.  The other man turns to his friend and says "Why did you do that?  He is just going to spend it on boos!".  The first man responds "That's all I was going to spend it on too."

I feel like the conversations in my head go almost exactly the same.  I think about how the company is always changing direction and anytime I try to do anything they are fighting me.  That's exactly what I do in my personal life.  This quarter I'm going to write a novel, a hundred pages later I have a third of a novel and decide it's time to start juicing.  Then I mix a really stiff drink of organic apple and carrot juice with vodka and the rest is blurry history.

I sabotage myself, I have a free day and I sit around watching television wasting my time just like my company sabotages my time by making me sit on hold for two and a half hours to answer a question (true story).

I think it is easy, too easy, to blame a job for treating us the same exact way we treat ourselves.

As Bill Cosby put it, I always thought I worked my employees too hard until I found out what they did to themselves over the weekend.

jobs and prison

A job is hell, a life sentence.  Clock in, clock out, pay taxes and die.

Most people I talk to feel this way, and I think they are lying.  Let me tell you about prisoners, the system and the ghetto.

Men who go to prison often go back to prison.  They are "institutionalized" and can not or will not break free of the prison mindset and so they commit another crime knowing they will go back to prison because prison is how they operate.

This seems like insanity for most of us living outside of prison.  How could you knowingly do something that will send you back to prison when you've already been there.

To me this is simple: for most repeat offenders prison is better then not prison.

That is why when you look in the ghetto's, the ones who really suffer are the kids, because the kids have no choice, don't know anything, and can't escape to prison.  Men know, they know that living on a dirty mattress in a hotel room that cost's a thousand dollars a month and driving to and from a job that pays them just enough to get them to come back the next day is worse then prison.  There is no warm food, no camaraderie, no future in the ghetto.

Whether good or bad, prison has a future, and you know exactly what it is going to look like.

You clock in and clock out everyday.  You get exactly what you need and somebody else makes all the decisions for you.  If you stick it out long enough they move you somewhere comfortable and you can die with reasonable health coverage and not in the gutter.

In case you missed it I quit talking about prison and started talking about the middle class and jobs.

The truth is that little suburbanites are picking a different prison sentence, albeit one that is much more comfortable on your outside parts, but a prison none the less.  And they are choosing to be repeat offenders.

What's that, my car loan is up, lets go buy a luxury SUV on a seven your prison term.  What's that, I got a raise!  Lets sell our house and upgrade to the max the bank will give us (and the bank will always give you just enough so that you can always pay them forever, in banking we call that being "qualified").

So how do you get out of prison?  How do you break the cycle?

Mark has been shot three seperate times and stabbed two other times.  He went to jail at seventeen and got out when he was thirty.  At forty he has a beautiful daughter, makes 75k a year and is looking at buying a house.  He went to prison and used it, he got his education in prison.  He found Jesus in prison.  And when he got out he went through a boat load of hardship getting acclimated to a world he knew nothing about.

I'm not saying break out of prison or quit your job tomorrow.  I'm saying use it.  Less people use there jobs then prisoners use the system.  Usually the biggest fear of the middle class people I meet is that they will at some point not be allowed to stay in their prison (or in their clouded minds they want to be transferred to another prison because they heard that one is way better).

Stop the cycle, both in the ghetto's and in suburbia.  Jesus once said "It was for freedom that I set you free".

There does not have to be a point to your freedom, it is simply for freedoms sake.  So use where you are, and then work towards freedom.

the most important reader of your blog

Is you.  I am leading a group discussion in a week and I knew I had a stellar idea to work with, but for the life of me I couldn't remember the idea.  Lucky for me, I had blogged about it here, and when I went back it all came back to me.

The most important reader of your blog is you, and I bet that is even true for big time bloggers like Seth and Guy.  Your mind learns by digging out a new spot of knowledge and then it beats a path there by visiting it a few times.  That is why you remember things you teach so well.

Your blog is just a lot of spots of personal knowledge, knowledge and ideas that you own but often times those go to waste because you never beat down a path to go back to them.

I often think of blogging as teaching, letting others learn something you had to learn through another avenue.  Not until recently do I consider blogging to be teaching myself in the future.  It's free, it's easy and it's better then covering your life in sticky notes.

your advantage

Your biggest advantage is doing what is outside of your normal comfort zone at just the right time.

Seth Godin talked about a term Kanri Yakyu where baseball is played exactly to the numbers.  Seth said this was a great way of winning more games then you lose, but the teams that usually win it all in the end break the rules and push past the numbers to win the big games.

There is something here for you. Whether you are a risk taker or a rule maker there is something here specifically for you.

1) If taking risk is easy for you then following the rules is what is going to get you into the big games, give you a chance to win it all.  On an average Tuesday in the middle of summer when a baseball team has played over fifty games already and has over a hundred to go they need to follow the rules to win that game more times then they lose it.

If you do that you are giving your natural ability a chance to win later on.

I love taking risk, but usually I don't have the time/money to take those risks because I didn't let the rules dictate how I was acting on a normal Tuesday.  For me, taking risk in little ways when there is really not much return is just damaging my future ability to play in the big games.

Mark Cuban talked about great baseball players who have to hit three out of every ten times at bat year upon year upon year.  Mark then said in business you only have to hit one big home run, one giant hit and you are set up for a career.

I think Mark is only half right.

The problem is, if you are swinging at every pitch that comes at you in business and life then you will strike out and not have as many chances to swing later.  Or, you will be so tired from all that swinging that when you finally connect what should have been a home run is only a single now.

2) If you are a rule maker then you will be in great positions every now and again to break the rules and win big, but that is going to be very hard for you.  Following the rules is what got you there and you are going against your natural instinct.  What is wild is, there are literally more good opportunities for rule followers then everybody else, but more often then not they are not going to take them.

In basketball here in Denver we fired the coach of the year the year he won coach of the year.  We also fired our starting quarterback after he took a bad team to the playoffs and won a surprise game in overtime.  They seem similar but are a world apart.

George Karl was playing by the numbers because he knew he didn't have a good enough team to break the rules, and he was right.  He also knew, that if year in and year out he did this there might be a year when Kobe got injured and he would have a chance to sneak into the Western Conference finals and break some rules to get to the finals.  This year was that year, but the Nuggets ownership lost faith and instead the team is mired in mediocrity, not good enough to get in the playoffs, not bad enough to win the draft.

Following the rules gives you a false sense that it is easy to make it into the playoffs, and managers and leaders will often lose big when they think they can replicate getting into the playoffs so they fire the rule makers and bring in a risk taker who doesn't have self control.

Tim Tebow was a bad quarterback.  Every game he ever played in his life he took huge risks, and for most of his pro career those risks did not pay off.  But one Saturday afternoon, after a bad team squeaked into the playoffs because everybody else was worse, he took a chance and won a game.

Gun slingers and mavericks are really fun to watch.  Managers and leaders will often lose big when they fall in love with the show and let the show ruin the product.  You do not want an exciting team on that Tuesday in the middle of summer, you want a win.

The moral of the story here is that no matter what your personality type is, you have a huge advantage.  If you are exciting you can discipline yourself to get base hits and be in the playoffs at the end of the year so your talent can shine.

If you are a rule maker, stick to your guns but know when a real opportunity presents itself (Payton Manning becomes a free agent) you have to take it.  You have to sacrifice what got you there to win the championship.

Both ways are hard, and in world of irony, both people will believe the other persons road is easier.  It is not, so just focus on your road.