Avoid Giving Your Influence the Finger
Remember thinking: I sure hope you don’t call me. It’s fine if you text or email because I can deal with that. Talking requires a quick thinking skill that is…quaint, old-school, and frankly I haven’t had enough coffee to remember how to do it effectively. You’re busy. I’m busy. I <3 click-communication, so can’t we just work our magic through finger clicks instead of moving lips? 
Plus, the NSA is listening but they won’t really know what we really mean if we’re not really talking. And DILLIGAS that they’ll be SOL and full of FUD? BTW, NSA, DBEYR and RBTL. Put me on The List. IDY.
2014 has been dubbed:
The Year the Telephone Call Got Really Sick But Didn’t Die Yet Because Some Old People Kept It Alive
(or simply TYTTCGRSBDDYBSOPKIA)
Catchy, huh?
So what do we do about these important stats?
- 98% of venture investors will never invest in a company where they have not spoken with the CEO
- 87% of start up companies claim that the key to successfully raising funds is a personal connection to the lead investor
- 73% of email recipients have read an email with an em-phas-is on the wrong syl-la-ble, thus creating a whole new meaning than the sender intended
That makes my head hurt, so how about this for you…
- 89% of trained salespeople would not trust e-communication to negotiate the best result for themselves
- 88% of folks who negotiate on your behalf think that e-communication is good enough
These statistics are Courtesy of Sortafacts, but I’m 86% certain you can find corroboration from a nifty site called, Google.
So, while we try to sort out this Communication Conundrum, we’re embroiled in a CCF (Communication Cluster F–k) at the highest levels. The CCF where NSA, Obama, and Ed Snowden arm wrestle, hoping to land on the right side of history.
And we ask ourselves:
- Is our government listening to and gathering on us
- How are they storing what they’re gathering
- How much do they really understand about what we’re trying to communicate
- How accurately is the communication interpreted
- How much does that influence in order to “protect” us
- How much do we care
- How much should we care
Perhaps we should also care about whether the intended recipient of our communication is listening. How they are storing our communication. How much they really understand what we’re trying to communicate. How accurately they’re interpreting what we intend to say. How much it influences them. How much we care. How much we should care.
If we gave 32% as much thought to those questions as we do to the governmental CCF, we would dust off our quaint, old-school skills (or learn them if we’re younger than 22), coffee up and <gulp and yikes> pick up the phone.
The reason for this is not nostalgia or lack of understanding about the incredible benefits of click-communication, but because lips rule over clicks when it comes to influence. When the communication stakes are high, we need to inconvenience ourselves and exercise our lips. We know this because studies show over and over again that the effective communication gradient goes from face-to-face to voice-to-voice to screen-to-screen. There is no doubt that if you have to influence, persuade or sell me something, it would be g8t if you…called. It works.
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