In the course of holiday gift shopping, I found a site that sells t-shirts with this pearl of wisdom from London, back in the Blitz:
And so I finally found my mantra. Stiff upper lip, do what you know how to do, back to basics – carry on.
So many of the agents I work with know this instinctively: now is the time for fundamentals – knocking on doors, coaxing real buyers off the sidelines, moving unreal sellers in the other direction. They are organizing their markets, shifting to quality, and kicking the riff-raff out.
As a technology vendor, you need to think constantly about this: if your product doesn’t make intuitive sense within the conventional business practice of your customer – in our case the professional real estate salesperson – it becomes an option. Technology has a naturally contrarian, assertive, energetic ethos, but it is therefore also prone to arrogance, inattention, and folly. The best innovation, in my experience, is inspired, not inspiring – born from watching your customer, tuning in, and an eagerness to make things work a little better, with a bit less friction, an unexpected ease that is delightful.
