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| The lineup... |
One of Dr. Cialdini's 6 principles of influence is the idea of reciprocity. In the most basic of terms, the means doing a something nice for someone will make them more willing to do something nice for you. From a business as well as interpersonal perspective, this largely means simply being nice. Dr. Cialdni recommends simply telling other people what you like about them (if they wore a nice shirt, tell them so!) as well as buying them a T-Shirt if it has their favorite sports team on it.
One of the nice things about working in such close quarters with Dr. Cialdini and his wife is seeing them practice what they preach (in every aspect, even though we are focusing on the reciprocity one at the moment). During the holidays, there are about 50 people to get gifts for. The last 6 months of developing my spreadsheet and shipping skills have all come to this.
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| They bought me a special gift wrapping hat! |
Initially, I was given 3 lists of people to buy for and what was given to them last year: a personal list, a inter company list, and a client list. The first thing I had to do was combine them into one file (still three spreadsheets, but I combined the documents so I can flip through them rapidly) and match formatting. Some people call it "neurotic", I call it "organized". In the end, there were several columns: Name, Address (international limited what we gave), 2014 gift, interests, 2015 gift, and "done?". Two of us teamed up to Facebook stalk anyone we didn't know well and added our findings to the "interests" column.
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About 1/3 of the gifts going out for
delivery! |
One of my low priority tasks throughout the year is browsing Amazon deals for things that would be good general holiday gifts as well as holding on to any promising catalogs. A few weeks ago, we got an ad in the mail for a website called "giftbasketsoverseas.com". Normally, even for a small item, shipping internationally is over $100, plus the cost of the gift. Though this website didn't have the best deals on the gift baskets themselves, the amount we save on shipping was well worth it. Needless to say, all our international recipients received something from this website.
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| They never end! |
One of the more frequent Amazon "Deals of the Day" is portable power packs. We have a closet full of solar chargers, cell phone chargers, and Car jump-starters (I got one of these about 6 months ago and am very pleased!). We gave the outdoorsy clients solar chargers to use while backpacking, and several of them got the car jump-starters. We've also included a few makeup brushes and flame-less candles.
This is a huge undertaking, and I'm looking forward to combining my love for spreadsheets with my love for the Holidays!
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