Observed

Before someone might hire me, they have to trust me.

1. Trust that I can fix their problem.
2. Trust that I can make their life easier.
3. Trust that they’ll like working with me.

Before they can trust me for any of these things, I have to demonstrate that I can be trusted.  There are a bunch of other ingredients and nuances, but that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

What are some of the ways I can demonstrate that I’m trustworthy?  A resume is just table stakes.  Plus, even a sparkling resume, five-star testimonials and the like don’t really establish the kind of trust that I believe clients want.

I’m talking about the type of trust that includes an emotional connection.

The key word here is demonstrate.  The more tangible, the more personal, the better.  Because when I demonstrate that I care by sacrificing time or something else, I help establish a personal emotional connection — which is what is most likely to get me hired.

That’s why I was totally blown-away when I recently bought shoes from Zappos.

Things started out simply enough.  After going to the company’s Web site to buy a cool pair of black Keen loafers, I ended up on the phone with Christian, a customer service rep in Hendersonville, Nev., to close the deal.

Now, I like to gab.  So, I asked her, “Where are you?” and “What kind of shoes are you wearing?” and what have you.  Nosy meets voluble.

Well, I not only bought the shoes, I had a good time.  Best time I’ve ever had on the phone that didn’t involve…well, never mind.

(NOTE:  My shoes arrived THE NEXT DAY.   Zappos has its warehouse about half an hour away from me in Shepherdsville, Ky.)

As a first-time custie, I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.  A few days after I got my shoes, a small envelop arrived from Zappos with a Nevada postmark.  IT WAS A HANDWRITTEN THANK-YOU NOTE FROM CHRISTIAN.

I felt like a schoolboy.  For about 15 seconds.  Which was when I Googled “Zappos handwritten notes.”

That turned up an excellent post by Stan Phelps, “Zappos and the Importance of Making a Personal Emotional Connection:  PEC in the form of Thank You Cards.”  Phelps explains that what Christian did — on the phone and afterward — is typical of the customer service branding practiced by all 1500 Zappos employees.

From now on, I plan on buying all of my shoes from Zappos.  And, I’m so asking for Christian.

How does a rainmaker make it rain?  How do these dinosaurs manage to walk into a room and suddenly, magically seem to own it…and leave with a satchelful of new clients?

First, there’s nothing sudden or magical about it.  In all likelihood, it has taken:

• Years of hard work. Mike O’Horo, Malcolm Gladwell and lots of others have spoken about the years of constant practice it takes to master anything — including business development.
• Vulnerability. Along the way, that means kissing a lot of frogs.  The typical rainmaker has become conditioned to dislike taking the hit (at least a little) and doing it anyway.

There’s more.  And, sure, there are the exceptions, the tireless extroverts who edited the law review, thrive on rejection and delegate easily.

A silver bullet?

For now, however, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s no silver bullet.  It’s not, as O’Horo and Dave Waldschmidt argue, about working smarter.  “To grow your book,” Mike wrote, “you must get out there and compete.”

Which brings me to Frank Bruni and Phil Libin.  The former writes for The New York Times, and the latter is the autocrat founder in charge of Evernote, a company that peddles note-taking and archiving technologies.

Mr. Bruni recently noted that under-25s had better pick more marketable college majors and get some help making the mountain of debt many take on look more like a molehill.  Otherwise unemployment or underemployment in their ranks will continue to top 50 percent (according to the Associated Press based on 2011 data).

What he and his hundreds of commenters (as many as I had time to read) failed to mention, however, is that finding work also takes time, hard work and a bunch of flexibility.  Especially the most rewarding kinds of work.

As for Mr. Libin, he boasts that he banished landlines on a whim when he set up shop in Mountain View, Calif., in 2008.  (The company also has an office in Austin, Texas.)  He says,

We thought, why do you really need a phone?  If you have a phone at your desk, it’s just sitting there and you’re kind of encouraging people to talk on it.  Everyone’s got a cellphone, and the company pays for the plans.  There are phones in the conference room.  We’re not a sales organization, so we’re not making a lot of calls, either.  If you’re at your desk, you should be working.  And that’s actually worked really well. I don’t think anyone misses phones.   Even though it’s one big room, it’s actually fairly quiet because no one is sitting there talking at their desk. The culture very much is that if you want to talk, you go 10 or 20 feet in some direction to a quiet area.

Hey, I have news for anybody who buys the bit about we’re not a sales organization.  We’re ALL sales organizations.

First, we all have relationships inside and outside the company with people we’d better be treating as if they were our customers…or, we’d better be OK kissing those relationships good-bye.  And second, no one can express or accurately read the range of emotions it takes to sustain a relationship without hearing a voice and, even better, seeing a face…in person.  At least occasionally.

Add these up and you get sales.

Ramping up to a point about competitive advantage

Banishing landlines — and the conversations that they nurture — is nothing new or surprising.  Mr. Libin just happens to be one of the more flamboyant examples of the digitally cocooned of our times.  (He also deploys a robot surrogate with telepresence when he’s not in the office.)

In a recent article, Sherry Turkle recounts a scene in a Boston law office described by a senior partner.

Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.”  With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

Ms. Turkle, an MIT professor and the author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, also notes that we “seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship.”

As Ms. Turkle notes, “Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience.”

The silver lining in this cloud (finally!)

In a world that texts and wears headphones (or earbuds), fortune favors the exception, anyone willing and able to pick up a phone and carry on a conversation.

So, that’s how.  That’s how (OK, one of the hows) a rainmaker gets to be (and to stay) a rainmaker.

PS:  If you have some thoughts about how, I’d love to know.  Call me.

When I connect with clients and others at Kentucky Derby time instead of (or, in addition to) the Christmas holidays, I'm being asymmetrical. The better to get noticed and remembered...something I learned a long time ago from Jim Durham.

The calendar says The Holidays are still eight months away.  For business development purposes, however, you might want to try a strategic re-frame.

Over the past few days, for example, I’ve been leveraging one of the times of year that makes Louisville (my home town) Louisville.   I’ve sent a bunch of cards and gifts to clients, prospects and referral sources that follow a Kentucky Derby theme.

When I do this, I…

1. Stand out from the crowd. While I call or write clients and others during the holidays, I understand that I’m probably lost in the deluge when I do that.  Not so when my people get a quirky note or Derby tschotske from me in late April.
2. Brand myself. Most of my clients are on the coasts in major markets.  It helps me to be known as That Writer from Kentucky.  I mean, where else can you claim Hunter Thompson, Robert Penn Warren, Bobbie Ann Mason, Barbara Kingsolver, Louis D. Brandeis, Marsha Norman, Silas House, Ed McClanahan, Sue Grafton and a poet by the name of Muhammad Ali?
3. Show some flair. Hey, it’s Derby!

You get the idea.  When the objective is to Get Found, make it easy.

PS:  This one’s for you, Jim.

As a business writer, I like to think I'm a LEED-certified Dunkin' Donuts. I want to make my customers feel welcomed and engaged...and eager to come back.

What kind of building are you?  Or, better said, what kind of architecture best represents the way you express yourself — particularly in business communications.

I got to thinking about this after I recently wrote an article about a new Dunkin’ Donuts store in Louisville’s vibrant and upmarket Highlands neighborhood.  (Really.  I’m not kidding.)

The Dunkin’ is a descendant of the street-loving polemics pioneered 50-plus years ago by Jane Jacobs.  It’s the kind of building that does a great job of connecting with its surroundings, including the tons of people walking up and down Bardstown Road, the commercial heart of the area.  The new Dunkin’ fits in while a few of its neighbors — including a nearby Dairy Queen from an earlier generation of commercial architecture and urban design — step away from street like little islands in an asphalt pond.

So, think about it.  Are you inviting in the way you write?  Do you engage your readers in the way a doorway or porch might invite a building’s users to come in or to set a spell?

Or, do you surround yourself with stiff and difficult words?  Do you present a turgid monolith or long, dense blocks of copy, or do you format your content to be more accommodating?

Just wondering.

Sportswriter Greg Bishop put on a clinic for bloggers in this morning's New York Times. Of course, it didn't hurt that UofL won. Go, Cards!

There are 357 really good words in this morning’s New York Times. They’re in a story about a college basketball game that happened yesterday in Portland, Ore., between the men’s teams from New Mexico and Louisville.

Here’s what I like about Greg Bishop’s report:

1. Brevity. If I believe what Jakob Nielsen and others say about our on-line attention span, Bishop made the first 120 words really matter.  They get the reader through the essential facts — who, what, where, when and why.
2. Engaging. In addition to the basics, Bishop gives us a splash of color…just to be engaging.
3. Well-structured. Bishop gets us in, creates a sense what it might have been like to be at the game, and then he gets us out.  Gracefully.

Think about that last word.  We make fun of TV and radio “sportscasters” and their tortured, clumsy, florid language manglings.  They’ve given a bad name, I’m sad to say, to the legacy of writers such as Red Barber, Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice and Ernest Hemingway.

Notice how Bishop captured the drama of a senior’s desire to get back in the game despite his injury, finishing his collegiate career, while “Louisville instead moved on.”

Or, how Bishop passed along the feeling when the Cardinals center “…took a pass and slammed home a dunk [which took the wind out of New Mexico's sails and] …effectively ended the Lobos’ season.”

I’m sure Bishop could have given us thousands of words about the game yesterday.  Thousands of good words.  But, he didn’t need them.

These are curated dog poop bags. For the person who has everything.

There’s a language for everything. Want to sound hip? Do this. Want to sound learned? Say that.

Want to sound…well, hip AND learned? Say curated.

So, I Googled some phrases and the like that include “curated.” Such as “curated dog poop.” To wit.

37.6 million results in under a second. We have such a wonderful language.

Yep, you guessed it. It’s curated.

Like words? Read Joyce.

At least not much.  They scan.

Particularly if they’re well-educated, high-literacy visitors to a Web site.

I was reminded of this bit of well-documented research in a recent post by Jakob Nielsen.  In this post, the king of user interface went on to report that the average reader reads just 120 words per page.  (FYI, that was 53 words…if you’ve even gotten this far.)

So, the big take-away for Web content is to Keep It Short.

PS:  Here’s a related post.

Technorati has a pretty good idea why we blog. Since 2002, the blog search engine has been tracking millions of blogs and social media worldwide.

I plan to have a big birthday May 12th.  (As a public service, here’s my Amazon Wish List.)  So, I identify with the blogging impulse identified by Kevin O’Keefe in his Why bother with a law blog? post yesterday.

For an answer, Kevin turned to Bill Gates (son of a prominent lawyer) and others.  He heard that at least some of us blog in order to leave a legacy.  In other words, it’s recognition that life is short and the written word is long.

No doubt.  A sense of mortality explains a lot of the choices we’ve been making every day for centuries…from child rearing to cave paintings and a lot in between.

If, however, you care to really know why people blog, ask Technorati.  It’s the preeminent blog search engine, tracking and analyzing blogs since its launch in 2002.  In 2008, it claimed to be following 112 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media worldwide.

Technorati’s go-to State of the Blogosphere reports that expressing a personal passion (such as a hobby) ranks high in explaining the urge to blog. So does seeking a connection with others — particularly if others are like-minded.  Conversely, making money is toward the bottom of the list.

On the other hand, a lot of us apparently blog to advance careers or to gain professional recognition.

So, Kevin’s right.  Leaving a legacy is part of the answer.  Maybe a big reason why we blog.

My sense, however, is that we all blog for different reasons.  Or, different shades of one or two big, virtually universal reasons.

Because after all, we never get any better than human.  Whether we blog or not.

Take a look at Seth’s post from this morning.  Tell me if you agree that vendors and clients live in the binary world Seth seems to describe — where we either use our power to choose or we don’t.

Or, as Seth puts it, we abdicate.

So many things are now completely up to us, more than ever before. Where and how and when we work and invest and interact and instruct and learn…

If you think you have no choice but to do what you do now, you’ve already made a serious error.

It seems to me that passing the buck on this merely because it’s easier than choosing is precisely the wrong strategy. It enables an abdication of power that will be very hard to reverse. It’s up to you, and that’s part of the power that you’ve got.

I get that I have the power to choose.  I also understand that my clients have the same power, authority and ability to choose that I have.

In the best, most satisfying relationships, however, I’ve found that my clients and I share.

I typically, for example, offer my clients options.  I might say, Would you like me to make some recommendations?  Or, perhaps, I might even ask, Would you like for me to choose?

They might say no.  They might say yes.  Whatever they say at any given moment, it’s part of a conversation that reflects the respect we have for ourselves and for one another.

And one that reflects the need to be willing and open to the possibilities of collaboration.