Jeff Ogden, President of Find New Customers, the most Likeable company in B2B marketing today, went to breakfast with David Sable, Global CEO of Y&R in New York City after Jeff did an video interview of David at a Y&R event, which was a lot of fun.
David’s now a good friend of mine.
One of the things we discussed at breakfast was the power of saying”yes”
We discussed how I got started hosting a TV show in the first place. I told him I said “Yes” to the first offer and he said saying yes is something he did his entire career and the importance of Yes is the theme of this post.
Saying Yes is how I became the host of Marketing Made Simple TV and how I booked so many great guests on the show, like Beth Comstock of GE (photo), Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute, Laura Patterson of VisionEdge Marketing and Stan Phelps too.
All the shows still live on YouTube, though the show is no longer being done after my nasty fall.
I’m now reading an awesome book
What do when it’s your turn (and it’s always your turn) by Seth Godin,
which was a gift from Likeable Local, our business partners, and it’s a great book.
Page 136 of the book is titled “Saying yes” and let me quote it for you, because it reinforces the importance of Yes.
“The world around us regularly offers us opportunities to step up and raise our hands. We get a chance to be needed and do what matters. And we rarely say “yes” to that opportunity. We hesitate because the yes offends our need to play it safe, our need to be picked, and it’s true, our need to work on other, more urgent, needs.
If you are intent on resolving tensions and dedicated to finding gratification sooner rather than later, it’s extremely difficult to be in the mood for yes, to be open to the possibility of something you didn’t plan for.
As we make our world smaller by saying no, it gets ever easier to be alone in our thoughts, to tend the garden of our fears and imagined inadequacies No closes doors, no diminishes the external distractions that can take away from our internal chatter. No feels safe but no is a way to amplify the noise in our heads.
Yes is an invitation to the rest of the world. An invitation to be needed.”
Seth Godin is a great writer, isn’t he? He keeps it short and shares great examples and images. Thank you for letting me share his story of Yes.
Thanks to Likeable Local and especially their CEO @davekepen for sharing this great book with Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers.
One of the signs at Y&R said a good line “If you don’t ask, the answer is no!” Amen to that idea, David.
A good example of asking is a man I met at a Vistage meeting. Brett from ESPN, who ran the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl game, booked a limo and a police escort for a handicapped child to the bowl game.
How did Brett do that? He simply asked a limo company and the police and they all said yes. He simply asked.
Saying Yes got me an online TV show with Act-On Software called Mad Marketing TV, when David Appelbaum was VP of Marketing there. (David’s now Senior VP of Marketing at Moka5 and he once said to me “Jeff, I knew you were the right man for the show.”
Thank you, David. I turned out to be a great interviewer and I was always well prepared. I sure miss doing that show, all of which was directed by my friend Craig Yaris of Social Ribbit Please check out Craig’s company in New York because they are a partner of Constant Contact..
Saying Yes served David Sable’s career well too.
Do you say Yes whenever you can? It’s a great strategy for life and business, so say Yes often.
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