Category: Learning

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Polite but persistent

Years ago we had a sales rep in Canada, Ying Zhang. She was a middle aged mum pitching contract manufacturing.

I met her largest client for drinks. He told me how he had asked her to leave his office on multiple occasions. “Please stop bothering me, I have vendors for my products. I don’t need another one.”

She emailed him the next day and walked back in the following week with a revised offer. And the week after that. And the week after that. Until he finally relented “just to shut her up.”

Ying was always polite but persistent.

When I reviewed our sales. Most of our clients had taken 6-18 months to come onboard. With at least a dozen calls and emails to get to meetings and then following up with usually 3 or 4 more meetings to land the first deals.

I reviewed a few of our own vendors and found the same thing. Polite but persistent.

Making sales means making it through this buffer zone. It’s rare a sale is made on the first point of contact.

If you’re aware of this you can think of the sales journey as a learning experience. It’s not an all or nothing communication it’s another step in understanding. 

This isn’t a license to be spammy but it is a lesson not to give up on the first rebuttal.

What’s your experience?

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How to Read a Book a Week

“I hope you’re not reading non-fiction books word-for-word like they’re fiction books, Listen, you don’t need to read these books. You need to understand them.” ~ Michael Jimenez

I read a lot.

There’s nothing I enjoy more than a good book. Even better if they have a bibliography.

A few years back I came across an HBR article by Peter Bregman. It had the following gems of reading wisdom that he inherited from his history professor. Even though most of my reading is now books in digital formats, these tips have made a huge difference in how I consume non-fiction. I hope they help you too.

Fiction demands that we enter a world of the author’s making. Non-fiction makes a point and asks us to learn from it.

Professor Jimenez’s advice on reading non-fiction:

  1. Start with the author. Who wrote the book? Read his or her bio. If you can find a brief interview or article online about the author, read that quickly. It will give you a sense of the person’s bias and perspective.
  2. Read the title, the subtitle, the front flap, and the table of contents. What’s the big-picture argument of the book? How is that argument laid out? By now, you could probably describe the main idea of the book to someone who hasn’t read it.
  3. Read the introduction and the conclusion. The author makes their case in the opening and closing argument of the book. Read these two sections word for word but quickly. You already have a general sense of where the author is going, and these sections will tell you how they plan to get there (introduction) and what they hope you got out of it (conclusion).
  4. Read/skim each chapter. Read the title and anywhere from the first few paragraphs to the first few pages of the chapter to figure out how the author is using this chapter and where it fits into the argument of the book. Then skim through the headings and subheadings (if there are any) to get a feel for the flow. Read the first sentence of each paragraph and the last. If you get the meaning, move on. Otherwise, you may want to read the whole paragraph. Once you’ve gotten an understanding of the chapter, you may be able to skim over whole pages, as the argument may be clear to you and also may repeat itself.
  5. End with the table of contents again. Once you’ve finished the book, return to the table of contents and summarise it in your head. Take a few moments to relive the flow of the book, the arguments you considered, the stories you remember, the journey you went on with the author.

Take notes.