This is a great piece by Ron Johnson who built the Apple Stores. I don’t usually post things about retail, because it’s not my expertise, but this paragraph sums up everything that is changing about marketing, selling, relationships and more whether online or in retail. This is the future and strangely enough, it’s the past. We are returning to the days where you counted on your local merchant to help you, know you, and provide superior service. It will be the death knell of those that don’t get it.

I am an Apple Store customer on a regular basis, because they make it easy and helpful and I TRUST them. There are great lessons here that I try to impart to our Miami Internet marketing clients and the primary one is, no matter what you sell and how many you sell, you better be about the relationship and the value you can provide before, during, and after the sale. The benefit to you is huge, because it means you don’t have to work nearly as hard to get repeat sales and referrals and you gain loyalty.

But if Apple products were the key to the Stores’ success, how do you explain the fact that people flock to the stores to buy Apple products at full price when Wal-Mart, Best-Buy, and Target carry most of them, often discounted in various ways, and Amazon carries them all — and doesn’t charge sales tax!

People come to the Apple Store for the experience — and they’re willing to pay a premium for that. There are lots of components to that experience, but maybe the most important — and this is something that can translate to any retailer — is that the staff isn’t focused on selling stuff, it’s focused on building relationships and trying to make people’s lives better. That may sound hokey, but it’s true. The staff is exceptionally well trained, and they’re not on commission, so it makes no difference to them if they sell you an expensive new computer or help you make your old one run better so you’re happy with it. Their job is to figure out what you need and help you get it, even if it’s a product Apple doesn’t carry. Compare that with other retailers where the emphasis is on cross-selling and upselling and, basically, encouraging customers to buy more, even if they don’t want or need it. That doesn’t enrich their lives, and it doesn’t deepen the retailer’s relationship with them. It just makes their wallets lighter.

via What I Learned Building the Apple Store – Ron Johnson – Harvard Business Review.

Related articles

• Sales – the Apple Way (laf.ee)
• The Apple Stores: A Playground For The Apple Geeks And So Much More (granniethegeek.com)
• Apple’s grandiose retail store in Grand Central Station set to open in next few days (edibleapple.com)

I am evangelizing the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.Ten slides. Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting

via How to Change the World: The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.

Hat Tip to my blogger “friend” Guy Kawasaki for the link.

PILOTed: What I Learned Buying a Rug in Turkey

According to Robert Cialdini, there are 6 weapons of influence. We can all use them, and they are used on us, either knowingly or by accident:

1. Reciprocation: we try to repay what another person has provided us
2. Commitment and consistency: we desire to be consistent with what we have already done
3. Social proof: we tend to rely on what other people are doing to determine our own actions
4. Liking: we tend to go along with and follow people we like
5. Authority: we feel a sense of duty to follow someone who has authority
6. Scarcity: opportunities seem more valuable to us when their availability is limited

You can see how the rug salesmen used practically every one of these weapons in getting me to purchase the rug.

I sent this link to our call centers, because it makes a lot of sense. I know I will use this moving forward.

Hotting Up On Cold Calls | Aussie Rules | BNET

Not surprisingly, the biggest reaction that’s generated by cold calling is the fear of failure.

<snip>……………

Running a close second, is the fear of rejection.

<snip>……………

The third fear is that of giving offence.

<snip>……………

Imagine instead, you had approached the exercise with this goal:

‘To attract people who are genuinely interested in hearing about my work’

<snip>……………

By listening out for those ‘who are genuinely interested’ it is possible to quickly disqualify anyone appearing unsuitable or disinterested. Through these means, you’ll move more quickly to the next call and with a greater sense of purpose. What’s more, you’ll do so without being rendered inactive through fear.