A lesson in burger buying from Falling Down

This morning our friend Carina Smith published this post https://buff.ly/2WqHMPd, drawing the parallels between the great Michael Douglas film Falling Down and how we all feel about life sometimes. It got me thinking about what a great metaphor this film is.

If you’ve not seen this film, you should, there’s a great scene in it where he goes in to a fast food restaurant too late to buy breakfast and he ends up having to buy a burger. When it arrives it’s a nasty little shrivelled thing rather than a lovely plump shiny burger in the picture above the counter.

So often this is what we see in business (Particularly in our field of social selling) where the customer thinks they buying the lovely shiny plump juicy burger but in fact what they receive is the nasty little curled-up thing that looks like it’s been sat on!

The reason we face this a lot is because there is no shortcut. The tech companies will tell you that their advocacy or tech or AI tool will do the work, the trainer tells you that their “one day masterclass” will equip people with all the skills they need to be successful in this space.

That’s not how life usually works though and it’s certainly not how social works. If it was that easy everyone would be writing great posts, getting loads of engagement and selling loads of product. But they’re not.

If it was really as simple as spending $149/month we’d all be doing it. If a 6 hour workshop made people behave differently there’d be a host of people sweeping across social with great content and great engagement…but there aren’t.

There is no shortcut.

If you genuinely believe that closing a piece of business because you sent a cold message to someone is based not he words you put in the message rather than a fantastic piece of luck as yourself why people that claim that aren’t closing this business every single day.

The reason all this annoys me so much (and is my Falling Down moment) is because it’s you, the customer, that loses out.

You buy the tech, or the AI, or the masterclass, hoping that it will solve the problem you have in your pipeline (or visibility, or credibility, or recruitment) and whilst you’re implementing that “solution” you take no further action. Then when it doesn’t work you’re 3 months or 6 months down the road and nothing has changed - you still have exactly the same problem you had at the beginning but you’re 6 months closer to the abyss.

The clock is ticking on this. We are heading in to a Covid-driven global recession (well, everyone except Amazon is) and not having got up to speed with this thinking will be your undoing.

If you need any further convincing you might be interested to know that our friend Simon Kemp published a quarterly review of the digital and social world and in hist most recent analysis he found that during Covid the number of people on social has increased by over HALF A BILLION people.

Take action...take action now, before it's too late.