The Secret Weapon!

By Howard Partridge

Once you have identified past referral sources, you now have a profile of potential referral sources. You have a reward system in place. Now it’s time to make a visit to their office or store. There is one secret strategy that will do more for your referral relationship program than anything else.

What is this powerful secret? Food. Yes, food. In particular, donuts, chocolates, pizza, lunch, candy, snacks, etc. Food is the international language that everyone understands! Food is the one thing that can gain the attention that you cannot get any other way. The reason is that feeding someone taps deep into the Law of Reciprocity, which says, “If you give me something, I give you something.” With food it goes deeper. It penetrates our most primitive make up. If you feed me, I owe you the time of day. If you give me a treat, I owe you at least a couple minutes of time!

Remember the Five Point Marketing Message from an earlier article? What a great time to share it—while they are partaking of the delicious brownies or candy you just brought! If you walk in with sales materials, what’s their posture? Busy! Too busy to talk. But if you walk in the door with a box of Krispy Kreme donuts, they will listen to every word you have to say! It’s amazing, and I have seen it work over and over again.

I first learned this from my wife, Denise. She’s in radio sales, and I noticed that she would take her clients milk and cookies and, in the afternoon, bring them lunch. She even had a company that made custom chocolate bars and she had the client’s logo branded on the chocolate bar.

Just about every night she’s wrapping gifts for clients and people in her network. All of the closets in our house are jammed with gifts that don’t belong to anyone yet. She buys things as she sees them, then when there’s a need, the wrapping begins! I finally “got it” one hot summer morning when she was walking out the door to go to work with a laundry basket full of things for the pool—squirt guns, goggles, and flip flops. “Where ya' goin’ with that stuff?” I asked. “Oh, a lot of my clients have kids, so I’m bringing them stuff for the pool.” Hmmm…, I thought to myself.

I decided to try it out.

There was a large potential referral source that I had called on 11 times (yes, eleven times). I had nice brochures and a nice introduction, but I didn’t have the secret weapon. Every time I went into this place, I got the same response—a stiff arm came up along with, “We’re real happy with the people we’re using right now. Thanks for coming by.” But this time I went to the grocery store and bought a little box of chocolates for $2.99.

I walked in and a lady down the hall noticed me come in. I introduced myself and she responded with the same stiff arm answer. She obviously didn’t see the chocolates, so I said, “But I brought chocolates,” with a little smile on my face. You should have seen her body language change! It went from the Nazi stiff arm to standing in front of me holding the box of chocolates almost close to her heart. I could almost hear her thinking, Who is this nice man bringing me chocolates! Within seven days we began getting referrals from that company. And they became a consistent referral source for us from that point on. One of my early members increased his business $30,000 per month by making Friday “Donut Day.” He and his wife loaded up the truck with branded boxes of donuts every week and set out to see as many referral sources and accounts as they could. I ran into him at a conference recently, and he told me it continued to work so well that he now has other people delivering donuts on a regular basis. That is the case with us as well.

A final food story that is instructive is about an auto repair shop called Freedom Automotive. My service company has a nice clean fleet of vehicles parked outside. Freedom Automotive obviously noticed the fleet, and one morning a box of donuts and a little card from Freedom Automotive showed up at our office. The next week, another box of donuts. After about the fourth or fifth week, I saw my operations director walking down the hall with a fistful of donuts and Freedom’s card. He said, “We should at least give them a try.” (I mean after all, they might stop sending us donuts if we don’t, right?)

So we called Freedom, and they came to the office and gave us a presentation. They charged more than the shop we currently used. “Yeah, but the shop we use doesn’t even say thank you. They don’t care about us,” we argued to ourselves. In Freedom’s presentation, they showed us how following their maintenance plan would actually save us money. Who do you think we use? Freedom Automotive. This took place about 20 years ago, and we still use them today. I know what you’re wondering, Do they still have donuts delivered? Yes, they still have donuts delivered.

Find out what your major accounts and your referral sources like and take it to them. If they like Dove bars, take Dove bars to them. If they like Starbucks chocolate-covered Espresso beans, bring those along with you when you visit.

We have all of our existing and potential referral sources on a route. Every month we deliver cookies, pies, cakes, or whatever. We have a number of other “food strategies” too. For example, we cook breakfast for referral sources, hold referral appreciation lunches, and more.

What if your referral sources aren’t local? You can ship stuff. There are a variety of gourmet food baskets you can order online. Recently a man who owns a franchise called Candy Bouquet International became a client of ours—they make custom candy bouquets. I use a program called Send Out Cards . With Send Out Cards, you can send along cookies, brownies, and many other gourmet food items.

Try this secret weapon and see if it works for you. I know it will.

SOURCE

13:15:00 - By Vincent 0

20 PARADOXES THAT ARE TRUE

By Mark Manson

Some of the most important truths in life are contradictory on the surface. They seem like impossibilities, yet experience proves them to be obvious over and over again. It isn’t until you look a bit deeper, beneath the surface contradictions, that the real grains of wisdom emerge.

Below are 20 paradoxes I’ve come across which are, paradoxically, still true:

1. The more you hate a trait in someone else, the more likely you are avoiding it in yourself. Carl Jung believed that characteristics in others that bother us are reflections of the parts of ourselves that we deny. Freud referred to it as “projection.” Most people call it “being an asshole.” For example, the woman who is insecure about her weight will call everyone else fat. The man who’s insecure about his money will criticize others for theirs.

2. People who can’t trust, can’t be trusted. People who are chronically insecure in their relationships are more likely to sabotage them. Call it the Good Will Huntingsyndrome, but one way people protect themselves from getting hurt is by hurting others first.

3. The more you try to impress people, the less impressed they’ll be. Nobody likes a try-hard.

4. The more you fail, the more likely you are to succeed. Insert inspirational famous person quote here. You’ve probably heard many of them. Edison tried over 10,000 prototypes before getting the lightbulb right. Michael Jordan got cut from his high school team. Success comes from improvement and improvement comes from failure. There’s no shortcut around it.

5. The more something scares you, the more you should probably do it. With the exception of genuinely life-threatening or physically harmful activities, our fight-or-flight response kicks in when we’re confronted with past traumas or actualizing the self we dream of being. For instance: speaking to an attractive person, cold-calling someone to get a new job, public speaking, starting a business, saying something controversial, being painfully honest with somebody, etc., etc. These are all things that make you scared, and they make you scared because they are things that should be done.

6. The more afraid you are of death, the less you’ll be able to enjoy life. Or as one of my favorite quotes puts it, “Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

7. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. The old Socrates adage. Every time you gain a greater understanding, it creates even more questions than it answers.

My man Socrates dropping some knowledge bombs about the uncertainty of knowledge. He knew what was up.

8. The less you care about others, the less you care about yourself. I know this may go against every perception you’ve ever had of a self-serving asshole, but people treat people the way they treat themselves. It may not be apparent on the outside, but people who are cruel to the people around them are cruel to themselves.

9. The more connected we get, the more isolated we feel. Despite being in more constant communication than ever, research finds an increase in loneliness and depression in the developed world over the past few decades.

10. The more you’re afraid to fail, the more likely you are to fail. See: self-fulfilling prophecy.

11. The harder you push for something, the harder it will feel to achieve. When we expect something to be difficult, we often unconsciously make it more difficult. For instance, for years, I assumed starting a conversation with a stranger was something that was highly abnormal and therefore “difficult.” As a result, I spent a lot of time strategizing and studying ways to relate to people I didn’t know. Little did I realize all I had to do was say “Hi” and then ask a simple question; that would get me 90% of the way there. But because it felt hard, I proceeded to make it hard for myself.

12. The more available something is, the less you will want it. Humans have a strong scarcity bias. We unconsciously assume things that are scarce are valuable and things that are abundant are not. This is not the case.

13. The best way to meet someone else is to not need to be with someone else. The defining theme of my book on dating was non-neediness and how that plays out in our relationships. The fact remains that the best way to find a sexual relationship — committed or otherwise — is by not needing a sexual relationship to be happy and investing more in yourself.

14. The more honest you are about your faults, the more people will think you’re perfect. The amazing thing about vulnerability is the more comfortable you are about not being that great, the more people will think you are.

15. The more you try to keep someone close, the further away you’ll push them.This is the argument against jealousy in relationships: once actions or feelings become obligations, they lose all meaning. If your girlfriend feels obligated to spend her weekends with you, then the time you spend together has become meaningless.

16. The more you try to argue with someone, the less likely you are to convince them of your perspective. The reason for this is that most arguments are emotional in nature. They come from someone’s values or self-perceptions being violated. Logic is only used to validate those pre-existing beliefs and values. It’s rarely about the objective or logical truth as much as it is repairing people’s worldviews. For any real debate to truly exist, both parties must be making an honest concession to put their egos aside and only deal with the data. This is rare, as anyone who’s spent any time on an internet forum could tell you.

17. The more choices you have, the less satisfied you are with each one. The old “paradox of choice.” Research shows that when we’re presented with more options, we become less satisfied with any particular one we go with. The theory is that when we have so many options, we have greater opportunity costs to selecting each particular one; therefore, we’re less happy with our decision.

Pick one. C’mon, PICK ONE!!!

18. The more convinced someone is that they’re right, the less they probably know.There’s a direct correlation between how open a person is to differing perspectives and how much that person actually knows about any given subject. Or as the philosopher Bertrand Russell once said: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

19. The only certainty is that nothing is ever certain. This realization almost made my head explode when I was 17.

20. The only constant is change. One of those little banal statements that feels really profound but doesn’t actually mean anything. But it’s still true!

12:49:00 - By Vincent 0