You Have to Meet People Where They Are

Sure, you're on the up-and-up.  You know what you're talking about.  You have a great solution.  You have the facts to prove it.

But customers are suspicious.

So, if you hope to convince them, you have to adjust for mistrust.

What's the first rule of adjusting?

DO NOT contradict customers' version of reality.

Instead, study the language they use to portray things and situations. 

Get a good sense of the "scene" they've painted in their heads.

Because, for better or worse, that scene is the world they inhabit. It's the only one they know.

Once you've mastered that scene, revise your message so it conforms faithfully.

And when you next speak, at all costs resist the temptation to challenge your customers' worldview.

Customers will dignify your effort to communicate with a moment of their attention only if your message meshes with their preconceived notions of who's sincere, honest and caring.

Wellness guru Roniece Weaver said it best: "You have to meet people where they are."

Are You a Flake?

In his blog, Seth Godin asks, "How do they know you're not a flake?"


A "deluge of noise" in the market has made every prospect distrusting, Godin says.  So when you pitch an idea, the prospect automatically asks:

• Who recommends this guy?
• What will my boss think?
• Where does he work?
• When I visit his Website, is it flaky?

"Notice that all of these questions get asked before the idea is even analyzed," Godin writes.  That's because, "not all good ideas are pre-proven, sophisticated and from reliable sources."

In my view, there are four other questions a prospect asks during the first contact:

• Does this guy speak my language?
• Does he only use jargon and superlatives?
• Does he like scare tactics?
• Does he blather?

Word derivations say a lot. The English word trust comes from the German Trost, which means "comfort."

Do you make prospects comfortable?  

Or are you a flake?

Pure Poetry

Nearly everyone's favorite TV commercial during the Super Bowl was Chrysler's, featuring a crusty Clint Eastwood promising "the world’s going to hear the roar of our engines.”

The lyrical copy for this spot was in part contributed by Matthew Dickman, as the Website Co.CREATE notes. 

Dickman is a respected poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker.

With his Chrysler spot, Dickman joins an august band of litterateurs known to have supplemented their income by writing ads.

They include Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Robert Bloch, Elmore Leonard and Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss).

Brick by Brick

Since early morning, a small crew of masons has been busy replacing an old concrete patio behind our home.  Soon we'll have a stately new brick one in its place.

Although I don't envy the guys one bit (the work is backbreaking and it's bitter cold out), I feel empathy with them.

While they're just outside my door stooping to remove concrete shards and stacking bricks in neat piles, I'm inside, hunched over my computer, stringing words together, then taking the strings apart; typing phrases, then deleting them; inserting punctuation marks, then replacing those same marks with different ones.

And I'm beat after whole a day at it.

Writing is hard for me, even though I've done a lot of it.  Composing sentences, paragraphs and whole pages feels a lot like laying a brick patio.

Ann Chenoweth and John Hayes are two social scientists who've studied writers.  They've discovered that writers compose sentences in a pattern: burst-pause-evaluate; burst-pause-evaluate; and so on. 

Inexperienced writers, they claim, produce short bursts; experienced writers, long ones.

Either way, it's slow, brutal work.

In my book, the Jack Kerouacs of the world—the writers who burst with the force of a firehose—are few and far between.

Sportswriter Red Smith was once asked if grinding out a daily newspaper column wasn’t difficult.

"Why, no," Smith answered, "You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed."

Springtime for Hitler

Newly unearthed photos taken in the late 1930s by Adolph Hitler's personal photographer depict der Führer's lavish lifestyle.

Hitler amassed his great wealth by mastering the art of propaganda (with a ton of thuggery to back it up).

Chapter Six of Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf presents his playbook for winning friends and influencing people.

If you follow politics, a few of the ideas may seem painfully familiar:

"The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence, nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another."


"The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble.  On the other hand, they quickly forget.  Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas."


"Propaganda must be limited to a few simple themes and these must be represented again and again. Here, as in innumerable other cases, perseverance is the first and most important condition of success."


"[Propaganda's] purpose must be exactly that of the advertisement poster, to attract the attention of the masses and not by any means to dispense individual instructions to those who already have an educated opinion on things or who wish to form such an opinion on grounds of objective study."


Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1925. The playbook hasn't changed in 87 years!