In today’s news environment, you probably have become adept at having your brain tune bad things out. Unfortunately, when you try to tune out information that upsets you, you may also be tuning out things that might be beneficial as well, like good advice.
We Are Emotional Beings
If you want to connect with another human being, you need to touch them emotionally. My mentor Roy H. Williams aka The Wizard of Ads taught me that you must first touch a person’s heart before you will win their mind.
Eye Contact
Did you ever realize that the human eye is unique? We are the only living creatures that have white in our eyes. The design of the human eye enables us to know where another person is looking (or not looking). Through our eye contact, we are better able to connect with another human being.
Our eyes also reveal whether or not we are being authentic when dealing with others.
Try Everything
The other evening, while my wife Sue was exercising on our treadmill in the basement, she had a song blasting out of the sound system that was so infectious, I had to go into the cellar to find out what it was.
When I asked Sue about the name of the song, she said “I don’t know, I just asked Alexa to play Disney songs.”
Turns out the song was by Shakira, from the Disney movie Zootopia, called “Try Everything.”
That song was immediately purchased and downloaded to my iTunes library. I find it inspirational. Here are the lyrics:
I messed up tonight
I lost another fight
Lost to myself, but I’ll just start again
I keep falling down
I keep on hitting the ground
But I always get up now to see what’s next
Birds don’t just fly
They fall down and get up
Nobody learns without getting it wrong
Look how far you’ve come
You filled your heart with love
Baby, you’ve done enough
Take a deep breath
Don’t beat yourself up
No need to run so fast
Sometimes we come last, but we did our best
I’ll keep on making those new mistakes
I’ll keep on making them every day
Those new mistakes
I won’t give up
No, I won’t give in till I reach the end
And then I’ll start again
No, I won’t leave
I want to try everything
I want to try even though I could fail
I love this song because no matter what the endeavor, no one does it perfectly out-of-the-box. We screw things up royally. It’s the human condition. But by practice and self-improvement we can master anything we put our mind to.
However, we often don’t see behind the curtain of people we admire, about their long, mistake-filled process, that led to the person we now know. We often think they were just born gifted. No one is.
People don’t connect with your successes;
they connect with your messes.”
-Les Brown
My Messes
Over my career in both broadcasting and college teaching, I’ve learned that success taught me very little, but when I messed up, I learned a lot.
When things are going great, the natural impulse is not to do anything to upset the apple cart.
Likewise, when teaching another person, only sharing your successes imparts very little knowledge about the process that led you to achieve those successes.
However, when you share the things that went wrong, and how you learned from these little disasters, and how you changed course to not have something like that happen again, real knowledge is shared. It inspires others.
Nobody Learns Without Getting It Wrong
My students told me how impactful my sales lectures were when they contained stories about the things I did wrong, learned and grew from, by messing everything up.
“WOW,” they would say, “here’s a teacher that doesn’t know it all, that makes mistakes” and, in the process, became a better person. It let them know that failure isn’t fatal and can provide some benefits.
Success is not final;
Failure is not fatal:
It is the courage to continue that counts.
-Winston Churchill
Pull Back Your Curtain
Don’t be afraid to share yourself with others. Let them in and show them you’re human.
My sales mantra when calling on a new business was always to Make A Friend on my first visit. People buy from people they know and like. They buy from their friends.
Re-Capping the 3 Ways to Inspire & Connect
- Touch people emotionally
- Make eye contact
- Allow people to connect with you, by sharing your messes
People don’t care how much you know,
until they know how much you care.
DickTaylorBlog 
I told my announcers to “Be someone your listener would want to have in their home for dinner.” Thanks for amplifying on my mantra!
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Excellent advice Bob. We are in total agreement.
-DT
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People do buy from people that they know and like. But I have found that price and item did the best job of getting them into the store. That is most of the battle.
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A little hard to sell people on listening to the radio, and your radio station with price and item though.
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Price & item doesn’t touch people emotionally over the long term. It is best used in print advertising, to reach people in the market at that exact moment in time.
-DT
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Price & item advertising on the radio is not friendly to the ear. Like sales, they don’t build long term loyalty to a business through an emotional connection. It really fails to leverage what radio is most powerful at doing and that is touching people’s emotions.
-DT
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I can’t disagree with you but I know we got great results using door buster type prices for businesses like supermarkets with price and item spots. I would tell doubting advertisers that wanted results and said that they couldn’t document if radio spots were attracting customers to try this: Run just 4 or 5 spots one day saying everybody in the store today will get a ten dollar bill. None of them were brave enough to try it.
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That concept has been around as long as I’ve been in radio (over 5 decades) and it is a great way to open a discussion about the power of radio.
However, the real power of radio is its ability to make an emotional connection.
I highly recommend Roy H. Williams Wizard Books for insightful ways to leverage the power of the spoken word through great radio advertising. Roy calls ploys that deliver instant results the cocaine of advertising and like that drug, in order to keep getting results you need to make the offer/discounts bigger and bigger to keep getting results.
But truly Mitch, I completely understand everything you are saying.
-DT
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Offering discounts also trains people to only shop in places where discounts are offered or only shop at THAT business when discounts are offered.
A very successful Best Western lodging franchisee in my area with white tablecloth dining with several other dining options had successfully used radio for many years, by having a very unique woman with a German accent call the local radio stations to do live spots during the noon hour or just before the noon hour promoting what was on the lunch menu and mentioning other things the Inn offered. Hildegard Schultz was very widely known around the area as a result of that, and so was the brand she represented.
The pwners began to try boosting their business by offering two-for-one newspaper coupons. Over time, the end result was people who ordinarily would have gone to their restaurants would only go if there was a two-for-one coupon. Well it might have put more patrons in the seats, it also raise their cost because they had to provide a second meal of equal or lesser value whenever there was a coupon presented. It didn’t help that at some point they abandoned ground coffee and went to instant coffee, which was a perceivable downgrade in the white tablecloth dining room. Very noticeable.
Eventually they had to close the restaurants Because the volume of business or income could not support them.
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Short term, quick profits often come at the cost of long term sustainable profits. This story has been duplicated many times in many businesses Ted. I’ve personally seen the story you’ve told in my radio sales life.
What they restaurant had was a unique reason to dine there that had nothing to do with the price of the food.
They paid the ultimate price for deviating from a proven path.
Thanks for sharing your story.
-DT
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After many years I am out of the daily radio business but I still do sports play by play on the station. I am familiar with the Wizard program. We used it. It is very good. In the very small market that I work in many advertisers images are well known. So selling image spots to them could be difficult. They seem to want results and we were successful with high control plans. Many spots in a short amount of time made them smile. I am sure things are different in other markets. That is why it is interesting to get the story from your experienced perspective.
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Very early in my radio sales career, I learned that everyone thinks their market is “unique.” The reality is all markets have some constants and when you understand them, you can be successful in any market — large or small.
-DT
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