“That reminds me, I was going to ask you. What exactly *is* our team concept?”

Friends:

As the baseball season is about to begin again, I am reminded of something that the head coach said on the first day of my only week of junior college baseball.  As the group of 50 players huddled together near the pitcher’s mound of the field at Los Angeles Valley College, the fall semester having just started and practice games beginning within two days, we all looked to our fearless leader for words of wisdom and inspiration.  Instead, we received words of idiocy and absurdity which immediately reduced credibility in my 17 year old eyes. 

I am sure that on the first day of spring training, all of the teams had meetings during which the goals and expectations were set out; and each team, without fail, had one goal in mind—winning the World Series.  Maybe the players have individual goals, such as stay healthy, hit .300 or win 20 games, but baseball is a team sport and there is no higher achievement than winning the championship.  The season is a long one, a marathon not a sprint, and there are going to be good days and bad days, successful weeks and slumps.  But of all sports, the law of averages is most prevalent and controlling in baseball.  So despite the wins or losses on any given day, if you win 2 games out of every 3, your chances of going to the playoffs increase.

Being a true student of the game and understanding that any team can beat any given team on any given day, I was expecting that the goals as set out by the coach would be reflective of this.  The goal of the team should be to win the league championship.  To do so, the team has to play hard every day and play as a team and not as 25 or 50 individual players only out for themselves.

Instead of this, however, the coach offered these words of inspiration:  the team’s goal should be to go 42-0.  Not win the championship (although going undefeated surely would result in a championship); not give 100% each and every day.  Win every game you play.

When I was in high school, our coach was an ornery, burnt out man who made it known to everyone that he had many other places he would have preferred to be.  However, he made sure that whenever you made a mistake, you heard about it.  I remember one instance, an away game, when our pitcher was struggling so badly that the coach yelled from the bench that our pitcher shouldn’t have gotten off the bus.  So you can imagine the stress with which we played the game, the concern that any error or blunder that we made would be met with verbal attacks or benching.  Baseball is a game that requires relaxation—the tighter you get the more prone you are to errors and strikeouts.

The same goes with the junior college coach’s goals.  One misstep, one error, one blown game in the bottom of the 9^th and the team had failed in its only goal.  How is a team supposed to respond to that? 

Lately much has been made about the Miami Heat and their amazing win streak, up to 26 games as of this writing, only 7 off of the record set by the Lakers of 1971-1972.  I remember hearing of an interview with LeBron James from last week in which a reporter asked if he would prefer to break the record for most consecutive games won or win a second championship.  If my memory serves, James said he wanted the consecutive win streak.  A lofty goal but if the team breaks the record but fails to win the championship, won’t the season be a failure?

The goal of every team is to win the championship and anything less than that is a failure.  But the thing about a goal like that is that it requires that the full season be played.  Jokes are made that on the first day of the season teams like the Royals or the Pirates or the Astros are already mathematically eliminated from contention, but that isn’t the case; every team has just as much chance of winning the championship as any other team and you have to play every game and see where the chips fall.  The law of averages will dictate success or failure.

But back to my junior college coach:  I am not going to say that not every game is important, in fact, they are all incredibly important.  But if your goal is set based on what happens every day and every day you have a chance of failing in your goal, then you will play tight, you will stress about at-bats and you will make mistakes.  Case in point:  the very first game of the season, our team didn’t just lose; we got creamed.  And just like that, we had failed in our goal.

I have taken this to heart when setting my own goals.  The goals have to be not only specific, but also realistic.  The perfect season is an anomaly.  Sure it happens every now and again, but any team can be any other team on any given day, whether it be T-Ball, high school, college or the pros.  Basically you need a whole lot of luck, the stars to align, and still more luck to have a perfect season.  So is perfection realistic?  I just don’t see how and I certainly didn’t think so at 17 years old.

Consider the professional football season; it is only 16 games, only 10% of the length of the major league baseball season.  And there hasn’t been a perfect season in over 40 years. 

Is perfection a realistic goal in any endeavor?  I don’t see how it can be and any goal which requires perfection is a goal waiting to fail.  Instead, the goal should be more forward thinking and broad-based.  Requiring perfection every day simply allows for too many unexpected forces to push their way in and muck things up. 

I cannot tell you how the junior college baseball season ended.  After the first week I was red-shirted, told I was too young and too small, that the team had 26 year old men who had children of their own and that I simply wouldn’t get a chance to play.  So by the end of the semester, I had transferred to a new school and hung up my cleats.  But I can tell you this—the coach sure isn’t coaching anywhere nearby anymore…

Have a great week.

“Are they made from real Girl Scouts?”

Friends:

I can honestly tell you that I have never done sales in my life and I confess that I know very little about that world.  And yet, a two-hour stint selling Girl Scout cookies in front of a Stater Brothers and I feel like I am an expert… because I have come up with some universal truths about the sales process.

1)    Location Location Location—A few weeks ago my wife went with our daughter to sell cookies in front of a Baja Fresh and I think she told me that for the two hours they were there, they sold a grand total of two boxes.  However, for a two hour stretch at Stater Brothers, we sold 95 boxes.  Why, might you ask?  Simply because more people walked past our table going into the supermarket than walked past their table going into a fast food restaurant.

2)    Timing is Everything – Did I forget to tell you that my daughter was at Baja Fresh at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and we were at State Brothers at 10am?  How many people do you think needed to get a Baja Burrito at 4pm?  But Saturday mornings are high traffic times for the supermarket, apparently.  This was further borne out by the fact that from 10am to noon we sold 95 boxes while it took the other girls 3 ½ hours to sell the remaining 90 boxes.

3)    Money Doesn’t Have to Be the Motivation for Your Sales Force – We like to think that our sales force requires monetary incentives to extract their very best efforts in selling.  That isn’t always the case.  I can guarantee you that the girls selling yesterday weren’t doing it because they were getting paid.  They did it because they believed in their product, they believed in their organization and they knew that they would receive some benefit from their efforts; it might be a party or a field trip or prizes.  But it certainly isn’t monetary.  And we surely got their best efforts at selling.

4)    Your Sales Force Must Be Genuine – It was immediately clear when we set up our table and began selling that the girls were excited to be there selling cookies and representing the Girl Scouts.  They didn’t see this as a chore to be endured, but as a rite of passage in every Girl Scout’s life.  And the fact that they believed in what they were doing resonated from our table and was infectious.  Our customers felt the energy and excitement and took the time to stop and talk and, more importantly, buy.  Even the customers who had to say “no” felt that they needed to give a reason why they couldn’t purchase.

5)    It Doesn’t Hurt to Be Cute – I hate to say it, but the girls were so cute in their uniforms and dancing around the table and singing their cookie-selling songs.  Brooklyn got numerous hugs from customers, just because they felt a magnetism from her that called for some affection.  I dare you to name one child who isn’t cute.  Seriously, on cuteness alone I bet children could sell ice to eskimos…

6)    Some People May Not Want Cookies; But They Still Want to Help – For as much as we would like to think that everyone loves cookies, the fact of the matter is that there are people out there who, for one reason or another, cannot purchase cookies from you.  It may be that they don’t like cookies, or we’re out of their favorite flavor, or they have allergies, or (as one gentleman told us) they are diabetic.  It occurred to me after we had been there for about 15 minutes that we weren’t really there to sell cookies, we were there to raise money.  The cookies were an added byproduct of our efforts.  But the customers only saw us as selling cookies.  We needed to educate them as to the purpose of our efforts.  Don’t want to buy cookies?  Would you like to donate a box instead?  People typically don’t like to just give money away; sure some people were eager to just give us five bucks, but many of the other people felt like their option was buy cookies or not buy cookies.  Once we educated them that they could donate boxes, we touched a nerve in some customers who saw us as only a cookie seller and we took advantage of their generosity to raise over $70.00 in donations alone.

7)    Not Everyone Will Be Your Customer – While there were some people who apologized for not purchasing cookies for one reason or another, there were others who were much more gruff in their rejection or ignored us completely.  The one guy who threw up his hands at us as he stormed off… whether he thought we were selling cocaine or something, I don’t know; but it was clear that he just wasn’t going to be our customer.  For the others, it’s a roll of the dice sometimes as to whether someone will stop and purchase.  If you asked me to judge the people as they were walking up and guess as to which of them would stop and purchase and which would avoid us, I would have failed miserably.  But for the girls, it seemed to not matter if they received a rejection.  They still thanked everyone who walked by and wished them a good weekend. 

8)    Know Your Product – Is there another product out there that is as universally known as Girl Scout cookies?  It was my expectation that everyone had a favorite—why thin mints, I will never know, but that seemed to be the winner hands down.  But there were still customers who either didn’t know the cookies at all or were just testing the girls to see how well they knew their product.  It was excruciating to watch the girls stumble over the cookies when the customer would ask what they have or what they would recommend.  What’s the difference between samoas and do-si-dos and tagalongs?  Ugh.  The other part of knowing your product is knowing what your customers want.  If you ask me, I would tell you that there is no better pairing in the world than peanut butter and chocolate.  Sonny and Cher, Simon and Garfunkel, Laurel and Hardy—you guys can all eat your heart out, you will never be chocolate and peanut butter.  And yet, that was one of the poorest selling cookies we had.  But we sure sold a lot of thin mints, so it was quite prescient of our leader to stock us up heavily in the little green boxes.

9)    Divide and Conquer – I understand that the girls are young and inexperienced in selling, but when the two of them were helping one customer, three other potential customers were walking past without any interaction.  I had to tell Brooklyn a few times that she should let her friend handle this one while she tried to reach out to the other passersby.

10)                       Competition is Out There – As was to be expected, we were up against some stiff competition.  Frankly, I would expect that the vast majority of you know someone who is either selling Girl Scout cookies or can at least get them for you.  So you may not be surprised by the number of customers who had to inform us that they had already bought boxes from their nieces, their grandchildren, their co-workers, their fellow students or their dealers.   

Selling seems pretty easy when you boil it down like that, right?  Don’t worry, I’m not quitting my day job… but I may just man the table again next year.  But next time, there are gonna be some changes…!

“Why is my reflection someone I don’t know?”

Friends:

I don’t envy those of you who have to commute to work.  Friday morning I had to make the drive from Valencia to Century City and, of course, it was during the onset of the torrential rains we saw this weekend.  But sometimes getting out into “the world” can open your eyes to some amazing things.  One thing in particular served as a reminder of a very important fact.

Someone is always watching and making notes about us.

When I was a kid and I would be out in public with my parents, as soon as I started to talk loudly about someone I knew, my father would stop me and remind me that I needed to be careful because I couldn’t knew who might hear me.  I try to consider that at all times because I never know whether my next client is sitting in the neighboring booth, is walking towards me in the mall…

Or driving in the car next to me.

Every single one of us is a reflection of something and someone is always judging us and those of whom we are a reflection.  I was reminded of this Friday morning as I saw a van with the name of an air conditioning company plastered on its side cut off three lanes of traffic in the pouring rain to get into the carpool lane.  And the thought going through my mind at that moment, other than that I hoped the driver doesn’t kill someone, was that I would never use that air conditioning company.

I am sure that the company is exceptional, but when you never have a second chance to make a first impression, my first impression of that company was poor.

I wrote before about the tow-truck driver who came to our aid one Saturday and, simply by doing his job, made me a lifelong fan of his and his company.  The reverse is certainly possible as well.  We can make lifelong fans from one impression and we certainly can make lifelong opponents.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford to have someone get a bad first impression of me.  Everyone is a potential client.  But it sure is hard sometimes, isn’t it?  Hard not to discipline your child in public; hard not to reach for your “bird” finger when someone cuts you off; hard not to check your email one last time as the movie starts; hard not to sing at the top of my lungs to Frozen’s “Let It Go” with the windows rolled down.

It seems daunting at times, this idea that we always have to have our game faces on, that we can’t take a break and let our hair down.  Well of course we can, we just have to pick out spots.  We just have to know when. 

Because if we choose to do so during a torrential downpour, crossing 3 lanes of traffic and endangering many lives… well, that’s not my spot for sure.