What A Real Impresario Needs

Balancing Impresario

It’s an odd feeling when someone tells me that they have my back because half of what I do I do to show one person can do it, that you don’t need a safety net, that one doing risky work doesn’t need someone to have their back.

What every impresario needs is not the hearing that someone will pick up the ball if they drop it, nor is it the knowing someone has their back; it’s the feeling of it all. The feeling someone is there to back you up, catch you if you fall.

Don’t tell your impresario friends you’re there if they fail. Make them feel you’re there by supporting their forward direction, appreciating their work, asking them questions that help them challenge their lizard brain thoughts.

Support is a funny thing. You don’t need an impresario to fail and fall to show your support. Giving them motivation to keep building their momentum – that’s the support impresarios need, that’s the trust that makes them continue doing work that matters.

The way an impresario sees it is this: they feel you’ve got their back when they see, hear, and feel you’ve got their front.

In the world of art, moving forward is so much more important and so much more difficult than dusting shoulders off and getting up after falling down.

Show you’re there to help forward movement and any impresario will feel you’re there to have their back, because, really, that’s the easier of the two, the safer of the two.

If your there in the front helping them do the work that matters, there’s no reason you wouldn’t be there if things were to go south.

 

Stay Positive & The Quickest Way To Become An Impresario Is To Support One

p.s. if you’re an impresario yourself, share this post with friends. they may need to read it more than you

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Feel The Room

Alfredo lost a sale and started our weeklong vacation experience on a poor note. It’s disappointing that one of the quickest and most common ways to lose a sale, to get a poor review, to turn what could be a returning customer into a one-timer is failure to feel the room.

Alfredo knew we were starving and were running on only a few hours of sleep, yet he stood around waiting for us to get checked in just to pull us to his office and talk about all the upgrades we could purchase and time shares we should consider buying then and there.

Talk about aggravating.

Time would have been better spent sitting at the restaurant with us and talking there or just telling us to come back to him later. It would have saved both our times. But, no. He failed to feel the room.

Actually, he failed to act on what he felt. He knew we were frustrated, tired, and starving. Is that the type of person you want to try selling to? I sure don’t.

I’ll take someone who has energy, who’s content, who I know is capable of desiring what I have to offer.

The concept of feeling the room runs across all life’s themes.

– You wouldn’t tell a joke about the reaper and death in a hospital room full of mourning people.

– You don’t make out with your significant other in front of her parents when it’s your first time meeting them.

– You don’t blast your iPod music during a quiet yoga session.

Of course, these examples seem extreme and quite obvious, but so are all the other moments in life. It’s easy to recognize when someone is frustrated, ancy, nervous or hungry. (And if it’s not, ask how the person is feeling then work on satisfying them on that note first! Selling 101.)

It’s obvious what to do next when someone says they are tired or hungry or mourning, yet so many salesmen (Alfredo!) reject the opportunity to do the unscripted, to turn a stranger into a friend, not just a commission.

 

Stay Positive & Feel The Room Then Act Accordingly

(even if “accordingly” is against the guidebook)

Downgrading What Is Free

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As unfortunate as it is, some businesses need to downgrade what they give for free.

Let’s stick with the same example from yesterday. Suppose that this bar and grill that gives large and cool designed mugs to those who go there on their birthday had to downgrade. Suppose they have to make cuts in their budget to stay open. They decide to give away the rest of the large and cool mug supply and replace them with small, round cheap mugs that just have their logo on it.

Unlike upgrading what is free, downgrading what is free hurts the customers you haven’t yet gotten.

On the positive side, it makes those who were there to get the free large, cool designed mugs feel even better. However, this has two repercussions.

1. Feeling better about something doesn’t mean they will want to come back again.

2. Giving something awesome for free is as much about optimizing word of mouth marketing as it is about making someone feel good for coming to your bar and grill, and not someone else’s.

The gamut here is that downgrading what is free risks negative word of mouth. Imagine someone who got the large, cool designed mug on their birthday then invites someone else to the same bar and grill in two weeks to celebrate their birthday, only, neither knows that the bar and grill downgraded their birthday mugs.

You can imagine where this leads.

This leaves us with the question of how we can make downgrading what is free, work. After all, while upgrading is always an option, sometimes downgrading is not.

The answer is, when you can’t change the product to make it better (or when you’re forced to downgrade), change the delivery.

People talk more about what they experienced than what they received anyway.

 

Stay Positive & Over, Over, Over Deliver

Garth E. Beyer

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Why We Consume

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In the early days, we consumed to meet our needs.

Then we consumed to meet our wants.

What most people miss is after we met our wants, we didn’t want more; what we wanted was to feel.

People don’t buy a BMW because it shines. People don’t buy Starbucks because it’s the best tasting coffee. People don’t buy bigger houses because they want more, more, more.

People buy into how items makes them feel.

Businesses have gone from advertising (more, more, more) to marketing (feel, feel, feel). We’ve gone from buying what we want, to buying how we want to feel.

Looking at it this way makes consumption seem more positive. The more you consume the better you feel. But let’s not forget that the less we consume, the more leisure time we will have.

Ask yourself, how would more leisure time make you feel?

 

Stay Positive & Better Than Consuming?

Garth E. Beyer

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Doing More Than You’ve Done

Of course that’s not possible, but feeling like you’ve done more than you have is.

Shoes tell a lot about a person. I always say that you never have to step in anyone’s shoes to know what their life is like, you’ve just got to look at the bottom of them.

Tried and true… until recently.

I’m wearing my second pair of Steve Madden shoes and I feel bad. I feel like I’ve done more than I actually have. You look at the bottom of my shoes and all traction is worn flat. Oh, and the soles are cracked, creating a hole for my heel to nearly touch the pavement with each step. (They actually did with my last pair!)

Alas, I’ve done very little of anything exciting while wearing these shoes. A few dress-up events here, a few nice dinners there and that’s it. No parkour, no carnivals, or community interactive events. In other words, I’ve done little while wearing these shoes. They seem to reflect the opposite.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe most people will only think the shoe is poorly made, and it is, but one thing is guaranteed: everything you use makes you feel something.

People love products that make them feel good, make them feel motivated, better-than-average, and like they accomplished something. Whether you think about how you feel when you use something or not, if you’re creating something for someone else to use, you don’t have a choice but to consider it.

 

Stay Positive & How Does That Make You Feel?

Garth E. Beyer