HIRINGLook for Storytellers
Storytelling is a powerful but underappreciated sales skill, helping you connect with your customers emotionally and encouraging them to lower that guard that comes up when confronted with facts. To ensure he’s hiring storytellers, Jeremy Zimmer, CEO of United Talent Agency, tests his potential hires by asking them to share a story. “If we’re selling something, we have to be able to communicate it in an elegant, intelligent way,” he told Business Insider.
ONLINEGo Rogue on Social Media
It sounds obvious, but the quality of your ideas and creative thoughts has a direct correlation to the information you’re exposed to, so choose your inputs carefully — nowhere more so than social media. In this area, it helps to be both purposeful and random. Spend what may feel is an inordinate amount of time curating your Twitter feed. It is an amazing resource when used well, and a terrible, potentially divisive distraction when not controlled. And second, throw in some random searches on Google occasionally to prevent its algorithms from stereotyping you and choking off your access to the wilder ideas out there.
SELF-IMPROVEMENTGet Unstuck
Feeling stuck is surprisingly common, whether we hit roadblocks at work or in our relationships or creative or athletic plateaus. To get unstuck, says NYU marketing professor Adam Alter, author of Anatomy Of A Breakthrough: How To Get Unstuck When It Matters Most, spend a few minutes “pouring out” your bad ideas by writing, composing, drawing, or otherwise generating content that’s actively “bad.” That can nudge you beyond the inertia that comes from inaction, and free mental space for more valuable insights to follow, he says.
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PRODUCTIVITYLet ChatGPT Know You Better
ChatGPT is amazing — and flaky. This is partly because it is like Drew Barrymore’s character in 50 First Dates: It has to learn who you are over and over again. To improve its output, let it know you and your preferences better by using the tool’s “Custom Instructions” setting. Dan Shipper at every.to has a useful explainer on how to enhance these settings in just a few minutes. Once set up, you won’t ever have to explain anything twice “because it will already know enough context about you to help — and it will do so in ways that surprise and delight you,” he says.
SALESCuriosity Is Key
Probably no piece of sales advice is repeated more often than “listen more.” But what’s often omitted is exactly what the salesperson should be listening for. Jim Lattin, a professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, says the answer is threefold: You need to learn what is important to the customer, what is negative about their current situation, and what they think might constitute an ideal solution. “With this information, we can create a stark contrast between the customer’s current situation and their ideal. And then map our product onto the customer’s ideal solution,” he says. But what usually happens is salespeople just make assumptions without exploring the hints provided by the customer. “Learning to be authentically curious is thus critical for effective selling,” Lattin says.
TRADE SHOWSKeep It in sight
Traveling for a trade show? Keep all your things visible in a hotel room, not in drawers, and all gathered into one spot. “That way, you’ll never leave anything behind,” says Kevin Kelly in his book, Excellent Advice For Living. “If you need to have something like a charger off to the side, place a couple of other large items next to it, because you are less likely to leave three items behind than just one.”
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DRIVEFundamental Beats Instrumental
Make decisions for fundamental reasons (take a course or join a club because it sounds interesting) rather than for instrumental reasons (because of how that course or club will look on your resume). Why? It’s more fun. But it’s also smarter. Instrumental reasons rarely work! “Lots of evidence suggests that people powered by intrinsic motives achieve the most,” says business author Dan Pink in his Pinkcast newsletter.
MOTIVATIONWake Up Smiling
Put a smile on your face the moment you wake up. “It tricks the brain into thinking: ‘Ooh, I feel quite good about today!’ It’s such a simple thing and it really works,” says Gaby Roslin, TV and radio presenter and author of Spread The Joy.