by Dario Preda, founder at Landing Pages Manager
In “Diary of a Body”, Daniel Pennac tells the story of a fundamental rite of passage, through the eyes of an adolescent boy. When, inexplicably and almost without warning, a lovely girl whom he has always looked upon from a distance and who makes him feel hopelessly inept starts to take an interest in him, young and insecure, he asks himself “Why would a splendid girl like her be interested in someone like me? There are lots of other boys who are taller, stronger and more intelligent than I am,”… and the self-denigration continues.
But she chose him. Why?
Has this ever happened to you? Didn’t it help you to recover a little bit of lost self-esteem – between pimples, first experiences at work, military service, university exams and who knows what else – to overcome that transparency that girls seemed to see when they looked right through you?
There were no PCs yet, or at least they weren’t so common, no cell phones and no Big Data, but we still had the Yellow Pages. The database of the time was a ten-pound brick of yellow paper.
Another tool for storing information was the agenda, which had a short list of telephone numbers at the end. The most advanced had a rolodex with sheets you could add and remove. Losing or ruining these tools meant a disaster of mind-boggling proportions. A bit like what we go through now when, for one reason or another, we lose the agenda function on our smartphone.
But the question – left hanging – was this: why did she choose him rather than someone else?
And the second question is: why has he never been quite the same from that moment on?
Pennac tells us that for a man, finding his center of gravity in a woman, being the chosen one, the one she chooses from about 3 or 4 billion others, is an incredible ego boost, as gratifying as (and here we get to the point of this article) finding, or better yet, being found by a potential client.
Is being chosen by a girl from among 3 or 4 billion other men easier than being chosen by a client?
But the question remains: why did the client choose this particular company?
And why has our company never been quite the same from that moment on?
Our lives are is often intertwined with our work.
After a while, that splendid girl leaves you for someone new, and you are left there all alone, asking yourself the same questions, although maybe a little less than before. That’s because humans benefit from experience, and experiences help us grow.
If we have learned how and why that girl or that client chose us, we’ve taken an important step forward. Transferring these experiences to good DATABASE would be an even more significant step: in fact, your memory can play tricks on you, and the girl you conquered says that it was she who conquered you, the client who you say chose you says it was a mistake.
Our memory elaborates and modifies the data it holds over time, but a DATABASE doesn’t.
And so we can tell ourselves that our first sexual experience was fantastic, and that the girl was completely transported. We can tell ourselves that our client was amazed by our creativity and approved of our approach one hundred percent.
But these memories often have little to do with reality.
To create a DATABASE you need:
- Honesty
- Ability
- Consistency
- Application
Honesty is the cornerstone of any relationship. You can’t create a database by putting in things at random, or even worse, collecting clumps of data here and there. Men love dangerous relationships, and similarly, companies buy dangerous databases, or use pay-as-you-go databases, a little like dating a hooker. I pay so I can dictate the terms. Sometimes it can be a convenient shortcut, but….
Ability refers to processing the data, interpreting them and then utilizing the information. “Data are like a crutch that supports every decision, paralyzing the company”, but they have to be used by competent people, spread throughout the company in support of precise functions.
Consistency is everything. Often, a DATABASE can lead us by the nose, like a beautiful girl strolling through the park. We don’t have a precise destination and we’re not sure which way we’re going. The attractiveness of some interpretations makes our head spin, like a beautiful woman. We lose our common sense and, worse still, we become disoriented.
Application may be a bit out of fashion as a term, but it is fundamental to everything we do. If you want to win over a girl, you must apply yourself (unless you or your company are stunningly handsome or have a name like Google). Time, application, perseverance, insistence: these are the ingredients of every successful undertaking.
Those who have navigated safely past the rocks of the first love affair or the first client and has gone on to build a successful career knows that the union of Data, instruments and people is the perfect combination for winning over both client companies and beautiful girls.
See our video and ask for a DEMO