TRANSLATE THIS WEBSITE

Post to Twitter

[Update: It’s back in stock – click here – and reached the top 0.5% of all books sold on Amazon]

If you missed it, my new book came out recently, Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com (blog post and video about it).  I’m been really happy that it was #1 in its category on Amazon.com, and that people have really enjoyed it and gotten big breakthroughs from it.

So, I’m sitting at my desk last week and I get an email from someone, a forwarded email with a subject of “Your Amazon.com order (#103-7284640-XXXXXXX)”.

I knew I had not ordered anything from Amazon recently, so I clicked the email to open and to my surprise, it said something like this:

“hey man, I ordered your book from Amazon, but I just got a note that they canceled my order.  They say they’re out of stock and don’t know when they’ll get more books.”

So I think, “WHAAAT?”

I always thought Amazon.com was a machine, that they had endless supply of all books, including mine.  And I thought, “how on earth is my book on back order?  It’s great that people want it, but not great that they can’t get it.”

Now, the note Amazon sent to people who ordered it didn’t say “we’ll ship it when we get more books.”  It said “we don’t know when we’ll get more books, so we are canceling your order.”  Ouch.

Then another email comes through “Your Amazon.com order (#104-1814074-XXXXXXX)” – another request from another CEO, basically “hey aaron, any idea how I can get some of your books for my team?  It seems Amazon is sold out.”

My reaction, “What? Another one?”

And then I look and my assistant Kristine is emailing me, saying she just got one.

And my Partner/CEO of Predictable Revenue, Inc., Marylou emails me and says she just got one… another two emails letting us know the book is on back-order.

So, we had a bit of a crisis on our hands…

Or did we?

Now it turns out that, later that day/week, we connected with other people who thought it was a good thing…as in “hey I noticed your book is on backorder, it must be a great book…I need to get it.”

So, why does everyone else think it’s “great” when my Predictable Revenue team and I are in crisis mode?

From Dr. Cialdini’s awesome book, “Influence: The Psychology Of Persuasion“, the Scarcity Principle states, “perceived scarcity will generate demand.”

Apple and Steve Jobs (RIP) were masters of this, with limited supplies of iphones and ipads creating lines around the block.

So I Unique Genius’d it and turned it from “we have a big problem” to “ok, this could be a good thing.”   (In the Unique Genius world, your challenges are actually gifts and opportunities in disguise.)

I would have liked to have left this post as a cliffhanger…”how will this turn out?”…but I procrastinated on publishing this post long enough that we’ve already fixed the issue 🙂    So…after a couple of weeks, we did get the Predictable Revenue books back up and running on Amazon so they’re back in stock and you can buy one here.

What’s Your Problem?

Did something piss you off or frustrate you today, or this weekend, or years ago?  Something small (a missing camera) or large (divorce, failed business, children challenges)…how can you flip it and re-examine what good did or could come of it?

PS’s

PS: For those of you who are interested, click here for a download of Dr. Cialdini’s article in the Harvard Review titled Harnessing the Power of Persuasion, where he explains the Scarcity Principle.

PPS: What was the problem with the book supply?  Well, let me just say that it was operator error (that means I messed something up with my publishing service!)