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Thinking about how to follow on from our work with The School of Life and St. Luke’s on The Daily Aphorism, I’ve been wondering how we could pull in some words of wisdom from the Twitterati. On the surface, it seems like the perfect vehicle to collect “words of wisdom in a sentence” but, as we all know, there is an awful lot of inconsequential chatter to wade through before anything of worthy of serious contemplation pops up. You may occasionally “sample the stream” just as Alain de Botton announces “Wisdom – that part of knowledge that isn’t only true, but also happens to be helpful” – but it can so easily be missed.
Twitter lists may help – perhaps I could create one for “Sages” (is that a good plural?). I did think we could invite people to use a hash tag – #wisdom for example – but that has it’s downside – not least that the hash tag itself would reduce the number of characters available for said wisdom. Words of wisdom in 132 characters (you’d have to count the space).
It may also be useful to have people retweet anything they found valuable in a “meaning of life” kind of way but the etiquette requires acknowledgement, reducing the character count further. Although coincidentally I did just tweet this “RT @alaindebotton Love your children and they will be able to outgrow you. Ignore your children and they will be obsessed with you for life.” – exactly 140 characters, man he’s on fire today!
I’m going to give this some more thought and any of your comments/recommendations would be welcome.
During a conversation with a friend and client of ours earlier this week, I was explaining that for the last couple of years, we’ve built up our reputation by concentrating on “delighting” our clients rather than constantly watching the bottom line. To a certain extent this has paid off but as a result we seem to be constantly over delivering. By that I mean we scope the work according to budget, then pretty much ignore it during the delivery process and do what we feel should be done on top of what the client is actually paying for.
To be honest I was having a bit of a moan, saying that we really needed to improve efficiency and be stricter on what we can or can’t do within budget, making more time for internal projects and sales.
Now I have heard over delivery described as one of the key enemies of a small business like ours. However, my friend quite rightly pulled me up and said that going the extra mile for a client, as long as they appreciate it, is probably the most effective sales tool we have at Sumac. When push comes to shove and budgets are being cut, the company that constantly over delivers is going to be the last company to be knocked off the supplier list and the first company to be recommended.
Food for thought whilst we’re planning our sales strategy for the next year.