Want to do something smart to enhance sales, donations or customer relationships? Create a "competitive experience."

A competitive experience is an event that is compelling enough to compete with the constant barrage of other events that swirls around us every day. Think about how events impact your life: you can lose your job or your car keys; you can have a war in Iraq or with your neighbor; you can face your significant other across a romantic dinner or a bill collector with a dunning notice. Consider the events that shape our times: 9/11, the Obama Inauguration, Katrina, the Super Bowl, Thanksgiving, our birthdays.

Nothing is as powerful as an event when it comes to getting somebody to do something. Not the Internet, not television, not the press, not even Twitter.

Suddenly, though, it has become fashionable to shun events. Every politician from the President on down has spoken out against events. You will notice that they are doing so after the election -- and countless campaign rallies and $1,000-a-plate dinners.

I'm not advocating lavish junkets, high-priced golf outings or big bucks black tie galas. Competitive experiences don't have to be expensive -- but they have to happen. For example, I recently heard of a financial services organization that canceled what had been a successful client event. I suppose they figured that their clients didn't want to hear from them anymore. That may prove a self-fulling assumption.

Even more interesting was a non-profit CEO who announced that he had decided against what had been a successful annual fundraising event. He sent out post cards asking for money instead -- and made just as much money on lower donations -- because he saved the price of the event. But he's also conditioned his donors to give less and next year, having lost this year's "momentum," he may find it harder to sustain the relationships he had nurtured with the event in the past.

By the way, the CEO made his point at an event attended by hundreds of other non-profit officials. Ironically, motivated by this experience, some may have gone home...and cancelled their events ... without realizing the irony of doing so!

Labels: events, fundraising, ggcb, marketing

Not long ago, I found myself in front of an audience of seasoned fundraisers. They seemed like a savvy bunch so I asked them what I thought was a pretty obvious question: "What are you selling?"

Initially, there was a dead silence.

Then, the answers trickled out. "A chance to give back." "Guilt." "We're not selling anything; they're investing."

Nice try. Then I asked the next question: "Is anybody else selling the same thing?"

Heads nodded.

"Do you think you're going to sell more of that or less of that in the future?" I asked. Light bulbs blinked on across the room.

Fact is, non-profits are selling something every time they receive a donation. It may not seem like that at first glance, but nobody I know gives money for nothing.

In these difficult times, when non-profits must work harder for every badly-needed cent, it pays for them to understand why their donors are giving -- or not. The "old" answers, which the fundraisers gave me, are really blunt tools.

I'd argue that the successful fundraisers are the ones that capture the trust and imagination of their donors. Those development professionals are adept at targeting and packaging their cases in new, innovative and powerful ways.

They KNOW what they're selling.

Labels: development, fundraising, ggcb, marketing, nonprofits

About 50 yards ahead on the sidewalk, the empty wheelchair stood like a riderless horse. Next to it, on the ground was a pile of old clothes. People were rushing up and down the sidewalk, stepping around the pile of clothes.

When I got a little closer I could see that there was a person inside those clothes, lying helplessly on the ground. He apologized for being heavy as I helped him back into his machine.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"No," he said. "Can you buy me a Big Gulp?"

"Sure," I replied. "What flavor?"

"Root beer."

I returned from the corner convenience store, handed him drink and wished my new friend well.

Then I rushed off for dinner with another friend who serves on the board of The Baltimore Opera Company. Over a better beverage than root beer, she announced sadly that the opera had that day decided to close after almost 60 years of performances. A great social asset is gone -- and it's not coming back.

"We had some promises of money, but there just wasn't enough out there," said general manager M. Kevin Wixted in The Baltimore Sun the next day. "To raise money for a season of opera was out of the question. We could have struggled on month to month, but we'd never get ahead. I know people wanted to believe we'd come back. But in this business, you have to depend on raising big money from people."

I guess they decided to stop putting the opera back in the wheelchair.

It’s a sad but important lesson of the economic downtown: we are all its victims -- from the homeless man on the street to the opera.

Labels: economics, ggcb, marketing

Thanks to an intensive period of blame-storming, we now know who is responsible for the global economic crisis. And, like Shakespeare’s Shylock, we are hungry for our just revenge.

Who is the guilty party?

Why, the Republicans, of course. And the Democrats, Congress, the Presidents, the regulators, the Federal Reserve Board, Wall Street, speculators, hedge funds, greedy investors, mortgage lenders, big banks, small banks, insurance companies, home buyers and sellers, student loan deadbeats, CEOs of all types, the auto industry, the energy industry, the Pentagon, welfare mothers, voters in Red States, voters in Blue States, the Chinese, the Europeans, the Russians, illegal immigrants, the Japanese, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, the school system, SUV drivers, Mexicans, health care providers, trade negotiators, union members, the press, African Americans, whites, city dwellers, suburbanites, farmers, coal miners, Baby Boomers, the elderly, youth, manufacturers of white flour and high-fructose corn syrup, pornographers, Catholics, fundamentalists, terrorists, bicycle riders, tattoo parlor owners, tree-huggers, ipod wearers, texters, government contractors, tax attorneys, everyone who lives in the Middle East, South Africans, and Google.

In fact, it’s pretty much everybody but you and me. And we deserve our pound of flesh. Yes, we do. What are you going to do with yours?

A thoughtful friend occasionally emails a note entitled "Just a Thought. " A recent missive contained this thought: "Negative thoughts fog your thinking and your perception. With
each doubt, with each frustration, with each fear the fog grows heavier."

Good thoughts, I thought. Packing my brief case for the day, I thought of other thoughtful friends. I emailed the thought about negative thoughts to them. And, running a little late, I left for a client.

I arrived at the client and, without thinking, I reached into my brief case.

No computer.

In the fog of thoughts about negative thinking I never thought to pack the one item I absolutely needed for my presentation to the client. Frustrated, and thinking negative thoughts about my thinking, I feared I might not have enough time to make it home and back. Despite my doubts, I made it through the fog and returned to the client in time to deliver my presentation about the energy that comes from ... positive thinking.

This is a story that illustrates a simple lesson: NEVER assume that the people who design your CRM systems know anything about customers, relationships or management.

I recently logged into a reservation system of a major hotel empire. I punched in the hotel I wanted, the dates, my preference for bed type, my personal information, my credit card number, AARP number, and hotel "membership" number. Of course, none of this was on a single "page." The system carefully digested each "bit" of information, then whirred and buzzed and re-displayed all the information, asking me to confirm each step. Finally, it displayed everything and then allowed me to hit the "purchase" button.

Click.

Instantly, a message appeared informing me that there was a problem and I should call an 800 number. So I did. Of course, I had to work my way through a phone tree before I talked with what could euphemistically be described as a customer service representative.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Our system is down. We're hoping it will be back up in an hour."

"What about all the information I entered?"

"I'm sorry, you'll have to re-enter it," he said.

Now, boys and girls, let's think about this for a minute. Why wouldn't the CRM experts design a system smart enough to tell you it was down before you enter the data? Indeed, what CRM genius would design a system so stupid that it makes you call a person -- just to tell you it was down? And why would you -- or anybody in his right mind -- enter the data AGAIN, since you'd never know until you were finished if the system got any of it?

Well, that's CRM -- but it's certainly not customer relations management.

I picked up the phone, called the hotel, and talked with a human at the front desk.

Labels: ggcb, marketing

Breakfast with my favorite doctor always yields a juicy insight or two. His fun fact for today: the average healthy person carries about 25 million cancer cells in his or her body -- and about 10,000 of them are malignant.

Our miraculous bodies handle this threat with absolutely no problem. The trick our immune systems performs is keeping all those nasty cells apart. But let them clump together, forming little colonies of evil, and we're in big trouble.

One of the key leadership issues, whether for the country or your sales team, is dealing with the little malignant cells of doubt and fear that will sap the energy you need to get the job done. Take a tip from Mother Nature: don't let them reach critical mass.

Labels: leadership, marketing, sales

Somebody once asked a country doctor how he decided what to charge for delivering a baby.

"Well," he said, "when I go into the waiting room after the birth, if the father asks 'Is it a boy or a girl?', I charge him $2,000. But if he asks 'How's my wife?', I only charge him $500."

Similarly, when I ask my clients "How many customers do you need?", I know I am in for an expensive engagement if they answer "As many as possible."

After many years of working with professional and financial services firms, one Golden Truth stands out: too many customers is just as bad as too few. The reason is that it's very hard to provide great service to too many customers.

So one of the grim ironies of these troubled times is that too many of us focus on getting more clients rather than paying more attention to the ones we have. Brokers are notorious for hiding from clients in bad times, because they fear the complaints. One knee-jerk reaction from many houses is to cancel client-focused events -- to save money. Another is to cut client service staff, thereby guaranteeing poorer service.

Now is the best time to build great client relationships. Focus on quality, not quantity.

Labels: ggcb, marketing

"A chicken," author Samuel Butler wrote, "is an egg's way of making another egg."

I thought of that unconventional thought recently in connection with a young non-profit, The Downtown Baltimore Family Alliance. The Alliance is a group of young families committed to staying in Baltimore City rather than running to the suburbs to raise their children.

Calling themselves "The Movement to Stay," they are approaching the problems of the city from a unique perspective.

Conventional wisdom says that the city will be better when the schools are better, or when it's safer, or when more businesses come to town, or when housing prices change. Or. Or. Or. The problem is that decades of conventional wisdom has not worked.

DBFA, on the other hand, counters that the city will be better when more young middle class families choose to settle and stay. So they are working to attract and retain more of them. From an historical point of view, the logic is interesting. After all, the city's future dimmed when middle class families fled. Couldn't the process work in reverse?

Perhaps we've been working on the chicken when we should have been focusing on the eggs.

Learn more about DBFA.

Safety and security, sociologists tell us, are some of the most basic of all needs. Yet one of the great lessons of massive economic downturns is that there is no safe place on the battlefield.

We are descended from hearty stock. Our ancestors were subject to disease, hunger, cold, marauding tribes, predatory animals, capricious royalty, and a medical establishment that believed in leeches. While our forebears hunted the bears, the bears hunted them.

So when the 401K statement arrives in the mail, the most primitive parts of our brains cannot tell the difference between the decreasing balance and a saber tooth tiger attack. At some level, we feel mind-numbing terror. Poverty is staring us in the face. We will never be able to retire. We will be reduced to eating dog food and begging on street corners.

Instinct -- and the fear that comes with it -- does not serve us well. That's because there is no absolute safety, no, not even Treasury Bills.

Our ancestors knew what to do. Did they sit cowering in their caves waiting for woolly mammoth tusk futures to turn? Did they stand idly by waiting for the king to guarantee the grain harvest? Did they stand on the docks waiting for clearer weather before boarding the next ship to the New World?

Nope. We are where we are today because a lot of folks higher up our family trees decided to do something positive to make their lives better. What did they know that we've forgotten?

Labels: economics, ggcb

Millions of words have been written about Captain Sully who courageously ditched his Airbus in the Hudson. But this animation of the flight, with the voice recorder in the background, really brought it all home to me.

For all of us who used to yell at the kids in the back seat to be quiet so we could concentrate on driving, Sully is an inspiration. In a hysterical world, here is a man who can face a watery grave and maintain a tone of voice that would work for two truckers looking for a roadside diner.

Click on this. See what I mean?

Not long ago, I was walking along the banks of a swollen river, when I came upon an angry little whirlpool. It was a little frightening, this tiny sucking eddy, but quite captivating as well. Like the sinking stock market, the vortex demanded attention and the rest of the river went unnoticed.

A good friend, still sharp as a tack at 80, fixed me with her bright blue eyes the other day and said: "Sometimes, I think I have lived too long." And then she laughed and said she had delivered that line in front of her young granddaughter.

"But Grandma, you take a lot of pills," the child observed.

"Yes, I do," my friend replied.

"Well, if you think you've live too long, why don't you stop taking the pills?" the girl asked.

Don't kids have an amazing ability to call our bluffs?