Friends of Dave #385: ❤️ you killed my music 📻
Using a POV to start a conversation.
Friends, apparently commencement name butchering on college campuses is now a thing.
Just one week after I shared the true story about my wife’s own recent brush with the epidemic, a similar story from of a different university in Philadelphia got traction on social media.
Hey, President O’Shag Hennesy: do better and heed the call.
Names matter…..your institutions seem to understand this point when it comes time to send a hefty tuition bill.
It is also something of which I am sure your advancement groups will remind you when it comes time to call on recent graduates to reach into their pockets to give back to the old alma mater and they are met with a resounding 🖕🖕🖕 because your people couldn’t get their names right at the graduation ceremony……
You see, one of the great things about having this newsletter is that it gives me a platform for sharing my point of view.
Every week I take my opinion or some ideas I may have on a topic and express them in about 800 to 1000 words for others to read and then react. Like or dislike, agree or disagree, you are presented with my POV on something, you then can synthesize it and decide for yourself.
A well communicated POV can be an effective conversation starter — and I can tell you that this is validated by the texts, emails, calls, etc. I get every week from readers in response to the topics we cover here.
It’s funny because I never really thought about using my point of view as a catalyst for conversation until a few years ago when I began working with my friend, former colleague and fellow FoD Charlie Simmons.
Charlie and I partnered on putting together sales enablement and go-to-market strategies for a startup in the construction technology space. One of my responsibilities was to create messaging that would help our sales team go out and win business.
Before joining this startup, Charlie had spent a number of years as a partner at Force Management. Force Management is a sales consulting firm that helps companies improve the performance of their client facing teams and creating cross-functional alignment within their business.
Charlie came armed with the largest and most impressive arsenal of sales and marketing strategies and tactics that I have ever seen in my career. One of the integral concepts of the Force Management methodology was the idea of delivering a “Command of the Message”.
Check out this graphic for aligning a message around value:
The purpose of the framework is to drive impactful sales conversations that connect customer requirements with solution features and and a company’s differentiation.
And as I saw up close, everyday, for almost two years, this all started with the effective articulation (in a slide deck or on a sales call) of value that is aligned with a well described, finely articulated, point of view.
When you think about it, when done right, the art of selling is really just the art of taking a conversation and masterfully turning it into a commercial transaction.
The hardest part of selling is actually getting the conversation started.
So what can you do to make that happen?
Share a succinct point of view — and be willing to listen to feedback, test assumptions, refine your thoughts and align your message to end up in a place where everyone sees mutual value.
Think about it — why does establishing a point of view need to just be a tactic to enable a sales strategy?
To illustrate this, I will frame it another way…..
My point of view: I have become convinced that effectively communicating a point of view can be a useful tactic to start any conversation.
Establishing a point of view takes thought.
It requires you to organize and structure your opinions in a way that someone else can easily understand them.
It often requires you to synthesize multiple threads into one single message that highlights the value of an idea or concept in which you believe.
By sharing that POV, you hope to align with someone else so that they see the same value in that point of view as well and adopt it as their own. If they don’t see it, you can have a discussion and find ways to revise and refine that point of view so that it is mutually aligned.
But without a structured point of view, the conversation likely doesn’t happen.
See what I did there?
We discussed here a few weeks back, and I reposted this week on LinkedIn, that we all suck at communication.
I believe, after spending hours talking to Charlie, thinking about it and applying the Command of the Message concept to messaging, one way anyone can improve the effectiveness of their communication is to start an important conversation or meeting or negotiation or planning session by sharing a well thought out point of view.
It may take extra time to formulate it before hand, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be etched in stone or 100% correct or refined, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier to get to alignment when SOMETHING is put out there.
You don’t need to be in sales to have a point of view. But we are all in sales if we want others to share it.
Think about that….
And make sure you take some time to send some love, warm thoughts and appreciation to your mother or someone who is a mother this Mother’s Day. Mom’s have a thankless job — they bring us into the world and their reward is a lifetime of putting up with all of our 🐂💩….and they still love us like no one else does….
How lucky are we?
XOXO
Dave
And now a few things to make you smarter…
In 2011, the World Happiness Report was born. From this they extrapolated a single “happiness score” out of 10 to compare how happy countries are.
More than a decade later, the 2024 World Happiness Report continues the mission to quantify, measure, and compare well-being. Its latest findings also include how countries have become happier in the intervening years.
All of us could do with more words of encouragement and perspective, and they don’t need to come from another person.
Earlier this year, Amazon’s grocery stores ditched their “Just Walk Out” technology, though it turned out the automated checkout system included 1,000 reviewers in India. However, this is hardly the only example of times when automation breakthroughs were truly powered by human workers in hiding – a phenomenon known as “The Mechanical Turk.”
“A boombox is a campfire, drawing in those nearby to enjoy a warm analog musical experience.”
Boomboxes are, by definition, excessive. With their deafening bass thud and dazzling chrome dials, these electric beasts are heavy enough to tone your biceps. They rose to fame in the 1980s along with hip-hop, flourishing as a tool for sharing and mixing the latest beats. Yet despite their widespread popularity, the innovators who conceived of these devices are still largely unknown, consigned to anonymity by the corporations that manufactured their creations.