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Creative Houston Sparks
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Are you facing a crucial business proposal? Here's a way to make sure you have the issues covered.
Sales Hacker: The JUICY formula for a B2B business partnership pitch by Belinda Aramide, 2202-11-7
Surveys are often too dry and seem meaningless. The Financial Times achieved a phenomenal result by focusing first on the experience of being surveyed. Here are the steps they took. (Note this was a survey of email newsletter subscribers, not all subscribers.)
Step 1: Make it easy AND relevant. They placed a feedback link at the end of all the newsletters, asking the reader how satisfied they were.
Step 2: Offer a meaningful reward. They staged a rolling drawing for $100 credit toward book purchases on their site. Gift cards would probably work as well.
Step 3: Start with easy questions. The first few questions simply asked readers to rate satisfaction on a 5-point scale.
Step 4: Open things up. The first open-ended question was "How can we improve?"
Step 5: Let them rate some options. The Financial Times presented some ideas for improving the newsletter, requesting a response to the ideas.
Be fun, sincere, easy but open. They were delighted with some extended suggestions they received. Click the link below to find out what they learned and how it will change their strategy.
Inbox Collective: How The Financial Times Got More Than 78,000 Replies To A Survey, 2022-Oct-19 by Sarah Ebner and Michael Hoole
First, we created a one-click feedback mechanism that was actually embedded into the bottom of the newsletter, providing an opportunity for our readers to give feedback at the point where they finished reading. [Emphasis added.]
Sometimes we make a decision and things go well... other times, not so well. This is a good reminder to take a breather and figure out what you've learned.
Center for Creative Leadership: Tips for Improving Your Learning Agility, 2020-Dec-2
Learning occurs when you take the time to reflect, to shift your thinking beyond merely what happened to ask why things happened the way they did. Reflection helps to surface the intuitive and lock it in for future reference. So step back from the busyness and figure out what you’re learning from a project, from an interaction, from a new experience. Talk about what’s currently working well and what isn’t — or debrief what’s already happened. Conduct after-action reviews where you, and relevant others, reflect by asking questions: What happened? Why did it happen that way? What should we stop/start/continue doing in order to ensure success in the future? What changes in knowledge, skill level, attitudes, behavior, or values resulted from the experience?
While reviewing the book Talent (Cowen/Gross), Rohit Krishnan suggests adding in a McKinsey interviewing technique, asking the candidate to tell a story that demonstrates how they've handled a challenge. Rohit was .
Strange Loop Canon: Divining Talent by Rohit Krishnan, 2022-Oct-12
Here the McKinsey technique, which I stress I have not seen used almost anywhere else in the corporate world, is to let the candidate choose a circumstance that shows grit, or creativity, or perseverance, or working with difficult colleagues, and let them tell you the story.
You then spend the next 20-25 minutes trying to go deeper into that story, to test that it says what the candidate thinks it says, to analyze whether she actually was pivotal in that story, and to assess whether the story is true! And Tyler and Daniel think this is a helpful way too, hinted obliquely.
…it should be a question you really want to know the answer to. So if the person worked in a ball bearings factory in Cleveland, ask yourself if you care more about ball bearings or more about Cleveland. And your follow-up questions should also reflect real interests of yours.
I have found this to be incredibly insightful, especially since most people don’t like going too much into detail about things they’ve done. It’s not to get specific information about subject matter proficiency, but to get a sense of how they think and how they speak and how they act with others. All of which are crucial factors to get a sense of how they get things done in the world!...
To me, the distilled understanding of the questions you ask should elicit:
Does this person care about the subject they're talking about?
Do they care to learn and spend effort learning?
Are they getting better at each interaction across any dimension?
And in the case of leadership roles: Can they get others to follow them?
...You can’t just use the questions outlined at the end and get much mileage out of them. But you can benefit from thinking through how you might come up with similar questions and figure out how to get answers to them....
One of the core conclusions of the book funnily enough is that it's not about hiring at all, but about a way of living. If you think of talent as a spike in some core attribute, and that a lot of people have it who are often overlooked, then identifying and encouraging them are extraordinarily good things to do. "Raising their aspiration” in other words.
What to do when they won't let you get a word in edgewise...
The Last Word on Nothing: What I Learned About Interruption from Talk Radio, 2017-Jun-12, by Rose Eveleth:
I have been called rude, brash, prickly, harsh, abrasive and the whole rest of the words that are synonyms for “assertive woman.” But I do get to speak. And I hope you do too.