The Importance of Being Important

“If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity.” 
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

A couple of years after I joined TriFactor, we were given copies of the famous book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, written by Dale Carnegie.  At the time, I had known who Dale Carnegie was and the famous book he wrote but I had never read it.  So dutifully I read it and it made absolute sense to me, making the complexity of interpersonal relationships simpler to grasp and digest.  I enjoyed it so much I first gave it to my two older sons and asked them to read it and then paid my two younger sons to read it.  You know how that goes, but in the end I was able to make sure they all read it. 

The book is full of wonderful lessons and historical examples of their honest and effective use.  I am gravitated to the chapter of the book that begins with the statement “He who can do this has the whole world with him.  He who cannot walks a lonely way”   It speaks to me and the book continues with “So the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it” How true it is in our everyday lives when we meet customers and get so excited to talk about our competence and our list of accomplishments which are important to us and important in general when really it is our customers that should be doing the talking. 

We should strive for our customers to do the talking.  How else will we know what is important to them?  In a distribution environment, there are many variables and definitions of success which are unique to the customer and unique to the main person responsible for the project.  You may deal with the owner who is interested in reducing labor, increase efficiency or stay in his facility longer to avoid the expense of moving to a bigger facility.  You may be dealing with a Distribution Manager who wants to improve customer service, improve the performance on company operational metrics and prove his/her worth to the company.  No matter what it is that our customers want, we can’t give it to them if we don’t make it our first priority to find out what it is. 

Difficult as it may be, sometimes we must suspend what we want in order to influence our customers to walk our way. 

For more information from Greg, view his page at www.trifactor.com/greg