The City of Brotherly Love welcomed SLA members with open arms. There were about a half a dozen members from our chapter that attended who will be sharing about some of the exceptional sessions on this blog in the coming weeks.
Keynote Speaker James Kane spoke on Loyalty
(c) The Photo Group 2011-All Rights Reserved
James Kane began with a long series of slides about himself called “This Is Me” with minutia that had little to do with his professional self. He showed slides of where he grew up, his food preferences, social security number, astrological sign, favorite sports teams, etc. This demonstrated to the audience that these details create chemical connections in the brain based on your own familiarity with his characteristics. Relationships are born from commonalities, and we are constantly looking for these connections with other people.
Our brains are hard-wired to look for patterns and shortcuts so that we learn quickly and easily remember new information. Humans develop emotions from birth as we learn who can be trusted and who cannot. The emotion of loyalty develops because someone or something makes my life easier or better.
Three things help to build loyalty in client relationships:
- Trust in my competency, character, consistency, capacity
- At first, we expect to trust people, and then we learn that someone is or isn’t trustworthy. Our clients expect to trust us already.
- Understand and manage client’s expectations, especially when they are unreasonable in order to protect trust.
- Belonging: recognition (do you know who I am personally?), insight (about the details that people share with you), proactivity (in solving a problem before they ask you), inclusion (avoid us vs. them and create solutions together), identity (be transparent about yourself to find common ground with your clients).
- Record details about people’s preferences and honor them whenever possible.
- Purpose: vision, fellowship with each other, and commitment to your cause.
SLA is piloting a Loyalty Project led by James Kane in 7 SLA chapters for one year from June 2011 through June 2012. They will report the results at the Chicago conference in July 2012. The chapters that were chosen to participate include: DC, Maryland, Florida/Caribbean, Minnesota, Rocky Mountain, Southern California, and Australia/New Zealand. Here in the Heart of America chapter, we will rely on the chapters most similar to ours for guidance on developing a loyalty project of our own. Since Maryland is the smallest chapter in the pilot, we’ll track their progress, along with the two rural chapters: Minnesota and Rocky Mountain (Denver, Utah, Wyoming & South Dakota). We have quite few HOA members who have been loyal for many years. I'd like to hear their thoughts on this Loyalty Project.
By Mary Odom, HOA Chapter President
