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Monday, October 19, 2009

Value of a Tag Line

I got a LinkedIn invitation and a breakfast with Joe Shumard, a Sales Lab Irregular from 15 years ago. We had lost touch.

At breakfast he said, "I suppose you want to know how I found you again?"

He is now Director of Development at the Alexandria Chamber of Commerce and was in a meeting discussing the value of tag lines. He said, "I remembered yours, 'Explosive Growth, Abundant Cash Flow' as the best one I had heard, so I went to the internet to see if it was copyrighted or anything. Low and behold you were all over the Google page. So I sent you that LinkedIn invitation."

I got that tag ten years previously, when I asked Jim Dixon, President of Bay Area Cellular Telephone what was the best thing I was doing for him. I was stunned by his response and never forgot it.

After seeing Joe, I came home and tried Googling "Explosive Growth, Abundant Cash Flow." Works best with the quotation marks, but it really works.

What are you using for a tag line these days?

3 comments:

  1. Dick

    What do you think about"Leadership through and thru chaos"

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's all chaos.

    "Real life" sends us more stimulus than we can analyze and react to. Leadership is choosing a series of processes to accomplish your goal, in effect ignoring the stimulus you can't or don't need to process at that time.

    Since you can't know for sure which stimulus to use, you need to be aware of outliers and as your situation changes, take advantage of different stimulus.

    One of the hardest tasks is ignoring stimulus that is no longer necessary, or is beyond your capacity to use. I often see people in organizations who have "devolved" their jobs until they are "responsible" for moving data from one report to another, no longer taking time to figure and execute what's important.

    Is that what you're looking for?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Dick: Great Story. A great book that discusses the idea you have initiated is "Made to Stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. I reviewed it in one of my blogs: http://www.customerthink.com/blog/curse_knowledge

    --AR

    ReplyDelete