I was in the community of Cranfills Gap, Texas over the holiday weekend. The only reason you might ever have heard of this Norwegian town of 350 people, two stop signs, and no traffic lights is that in 2008 the Las Vegas tourism bureau made national news by picking the entire community for a promotion. The Las Vegas bureau flew half the residents, virtually all the persons over 21 years of age, to Las Vegas for a fun-filled five days of gambling and shows.
This past weekend, however, I was not having fun in Cranfills Gap. It was Friday afternoon of a three-day weekend and my vacation property had no water.
Now, even though this is a remote area, a private company runs lines from their water wells to their customers. So, my son and I journey to the property anticipating a great weekend with our friends only to discover: no water. I rush into town (an intersection) at 2:30 PM on Friday afternoon. The office for the water company is in a carved-out paneled corner of an otherwise abandoned building. No one is there. I tap on the window of the neighboring office and Rita, the coordinator for a local contractor, jumps about a foot off her chair. (My tap was louder than I intended.) Rita tells me that the water people have gone for the weekend.
So, I tell Rita my plight and ask her what she would suggest. She gets on the phone and calls the water administrator: he has gone for the day. She calls the repairman: he does not answer his phone. She knows one of the board members: that person does not have a phone number listed. Rita calls a friend who has the cell number of the board member. She tries that number: they’ve gone off for the weekend on their motorcycles. She checks the internet. She checks her directory. Rita calls another board member: no answer. She tries a second person who might know. No answer. Rita knows all six people on the board. She calls a friend to get some of their cell phone numbers. No one answers.
First of all, keep in mind that Rita has nothing whatsoever to do with the water company. She is just one of the wonderful people in Cranfills Gap. Second, I found out that Rita is one persistent devil. On her fifteenth call she gets the president of the board on his cell phone. He tells her he will check and call her back. He calls her back in a half hour to say he cannot get the repairman on the phone, but he’ll keep trying. The repairman has gone home to Iredell and probably leaving for the weekend. Now, all of this has taken almost two hours. It’s about 6:00 PM on a Friday weekend so I thank Rita and go on to the land expecting that the repairman will show up sometime next week, if at all.
About 8:30 PM a truck rolls up to the gate towing a trailer with a giant backhoe. It’s Chris, the repairman. We hold flashlights while Chris replaces a faulty meter and regulator. (Chris does not get any extra pay for after-hours or weekend callouts. He works on straight pay.) By 9:30 PM we are in business. I have to force Chris to take a $20 bill so he can go buy himself dinner. Now, isn’t that a great little community of wonderful people?
But I tell you all this to discuss an essential element of persuasion: persistence. Success occurred only because of the unrelenting persistence of Rita, the scheduler for a totally different company. Once she was engaged there was no stopping her. She knew about persistence and she knew about follow-through.
If you want to persuade decision makers, you must be like Rita. You must try and try and try and keep trying. When it comes to computers or networks or engineering, wizards will work all night long on technology and never think twice about it. But when it comes to people, they somehow think that everything should happen with one request.
Here are the cries of the hapless technology wizard who has no notion of persistence and no chance of success.
“I called them but they haven’t called me back.”
“I left three messages. What else can I do?”
“I’m waiting to hear back from them.”
“I sent him an email.”
“I left her a voice mail.”
“I asked Susan to give them a call. I’ll check and see if she’s done that yet.”
“They said they would get back with me sometime next week.”
“I can’t get a hold of them.”
Those are the whines of failure, the whimpers of the unsuccessful. Opportunities do not come knocking, they do not even come creeping by. You ferret them. You seek them out. You track them down in the dead of night and the cold of winter, at the most inopportune times. You lay traps and stake ambushes. You mine for them like silver. You sift for them like gold. You work for every opportunity.
The world is full of people who will work for those opportunities, your opportunities. They will steal your opportunities while you sit and whine about it. You must take charge. I realize that as a technologist this is your weakest suite. You hate to “pester” people or bother them. Why, when you were a kid, you couldn’t even sell cookies to your grandmother. I empathize with you, but if you want success there is no alternative. You must continue to pound on the door until either opportunity opens or you break down the down and drag it off with you.
This does not mean that you keep doing the same thing over and over again like an idiot, just hoping someone will notice. It means that you keep your message, but you vary your techniques. You try different tactics. You approach from a different angle. You parry instead of thrusting. You wield a claymore instead of a foil. You pass instead of running. You think of another reason to call. You send a letter. You post a blog You do whatever it takes to make those opportunities available to you. You become persistent.
If you want to develop persuasive skills, know that there is no weapon in your arsenal that will serve you better than persistence.