Happy Lunar New Year

New Year, New Hope, New Opportunities, New Successes.

Wishing you joy in whatever you pursue!

Marketing Tricks #10 - Personal achievements

 

"I made 1 million in sales within the first 10 months, and you can do it too. I will show you how." Sometimes marketers sell dreams. They appeal to your deepest desires. If they can do it, why not you? They may have downplayed the challenges and hardships involved and the skills needed. 

What to do with this information: 

When you are a buyer, recognise these tricks and don't let them affect you making the right decision. Don't hate marketers. It is their job to help sellers connect to their target audience. As a buyer it is your responsibility to understand the product and whether it fits you. 

When you are a seller, this is a trick you can use. No matter how well you market, you must still have a good product if you want to stay in business. Do right by your customers. 

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Would you employ a personal friend?

On one hand, you want to help a friend who is looking for a job. You already know them, their strengths and their weaknesses, so you can judge better whether they are a good fit. You already have trust and you know you can depend on them. On the other hand, being a friend and being a colleague can be very different. There may be aspects of your friend you have not seen yet. Are you ready to lose a friend if the arrangement doesn't work out? Can you be the stern boss when you need to be? How will their presence in the organisation affect your other staff? 

Would you employ a personal friend? 

Changing your life is easy

All you have to do is change what you do today. You only have to worry about how you spend today. When tomorrow comes, repeat the same thing. When you think of becoming an accomplished musician, it is daunting. But if you tell yourself you will practise piano today, it is very much achievable. Success is not about having a lofty goal. It is about the small decisions you make every day. Know what you need to do every day, and be disciplined to do them one day at a time.  

When I wanted to achieve better health, one change I had to make was reducing my carbohydrate intake. I decided to cut out rice, noodles and bread from my diet. That sounded like a huge change in lifestyle. I had been eating rice all my life. How was I supposed to make sure a drastic change? The answer was simple. I only needed to decide "I won't have rice today". Then the next day I made that decision again. Once this became a habit, I no longer needed to make the decision because not eating rice had become natural. 

Success is an accumulation of good daily habits.

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Tips in interviewing people - have a standard list of questions

I am sometimes surprised at how unstructured some interviewers are. They browse your resume to pick out some interesting bits to ask about. An experienced interviewer may be able to go deeper by asking follow-up questions, but some interviewers just flutter from one area to the next without much of a plan. Preparing a standard set of questions to ask every candidate is important because it becomes your checklist. It helps you plan what are the qualities you want to probe for and what are the difficult questions you want to ask. You want to be able to compare your candidates based on the same set of challenges you issue them. Your questions are designed to help you get to know your candidates as best you can within the limited time of an interview. Don't waste your time going into an interview unprepared. You'd hate to meet candidates who are unprepared. Don't be an interviewer who is unprepared. 

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Why do you need to create psychological safety?

We all want to recruit competent employees. However sometimes employing lots of smart people results in a culture where people are reluctant to open up, show weakness or ask for help. Everyone feels under pressure to perform. They expect themselves to be superhuman because they think everyone else in the company is superhuman. The culture may even become distrusting and cannibalistic. 

If we can't cultivate psychological safety in our teams, we can't get them to work together effectively. We end up with a bunch of snobs trying to outperform one another, instead of a team that brings out the best in one another. 

This and other concepts in my book Every Employee an Entrepreneur, now available on Shopee and Lazada (Malaysia) and Amazon and Google (worldwide): 

• Shopee Malaysia
• Lazada Malaysia
• Google Playstore e-book
• Amazon
• Amazon Kindle e-book

You can't win arguments, you should only try to win relationships

 

There are many ways to handle disagreements. Winning the argument is not the only way. People are different. It is sometimes near impossible to change people's minds. People (including you and me) tend to believe they are right. Remember that sometimes the relationship and trust are more important than winning the argument. You can choose to concede. You can try the other person's idea first. You may "lose" for now, but you gain much more in the long run. 

Try asking this question. So what if you win the argument? Even when you are right and have the facts to back you up. Will the other party happily do what you want? Or will they only do it grudgingly? Or maybe they simply refuse to do it out of anger? Winning an argument sometimes doesn't help your situation. You have to think of smarter ways. Be on the same side as the other party. Find common goals. Let go of any of your own biases. Perhaps you will find a more creative solution. 

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Rejection of marketing is also a problem

 

I have written much about various marketing techniques, both for you to be aware of and for you to implement. Here's a slightly different perspective on the matter. There is a problem of understanding these marketing techniques too well. We may sometimes reject products before we consider them fairly, simply because we recognise the marketing tactics that are applied. We cleverly tell ourselves, "Hey I know this trick and I'm not going to be fooled!". The technique has backfired for the marketeer. We avoid the product and conclude it must be a poor product, or a product we don't need, without realising that we are biased when jumping to such a conclusion. If it is actually a product that can benefit us, we should spend time to evaluate it before deciding. 

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Green Book

I watched Green Book without reading much about it. That's the best way to approach movies - don't watch trailers, go in without prior knowledge or expectations. Five minutes into the movie and what kept nagging at me in my mind was "this guy looks like a fat Aragorn". I had to pause the movie and look up Wikipedia. Gosh, it WAS Aragorn! (Viggo Mortensen). I truly appreciate it when actors play their characters and not themselves. The movie is simple, subtle and warm.