“See that door right there, man I swear it ain’t never been locked
And I guarantee that it never will
That old man right there in the rocking chair at the courthouse square I’ll tell you now
He could buy your fancy car with hundred dollar bills
Don’t let those faded overalls fool ya, he made his million without one day of schoolin'”
– Lyric from “Where I Come From” by Montgomery Gentry
Granted I come from a town like the one described in this song, but this is less about big or small, country or city, modern or ol’ fashioned.
This is about transparency.
If you’ve ever said, heard or thought, “Man, I just don’t know where they’re coming from…” you get the drift.
What if we were willing to be vulnerable enough to be transparent? To be wide open about where we’re coming from?
If the customer needs the deal more than you need to deliver it, why hide that truth? It’s not like both of you don’t know that, so why do the dance and “play the game.” By the same token, if you need the deal more than the customer needs to make the purchase, why hide that truth? So many of the misunderstandings in business today occur when one party or the other — or both — are trying to mask where they’re coming from. How much time could we save if we…just…stopped…pretending?
Retail stocks hinge on Black Friday — yet the retailers still try to make us believe it’s about what we want for Christmas. The best deals on cars can be struck in the last 36 hours of each month — yet the dealer tries to make us think it’s about “getting us in the car we want.”
Impressions are fine, but they’re harder and harder to make (and impossible to fake) in an era where people post pictures of what they ordered in a restaurant on social media sites. Impressions are fine, but they’re exhausting if they don’t portray who we really are. And, unless they jibe clearly with where we’re coming from they cost time, money, relationship equity and value.
How much of a difference would it make if people always knew where we were coming from?
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