There is an amazing piece of technology that we often overlook. It is called the telephone. You may have heard of it and you may have even used it before. It allows you to hear another person speaking while they are miles and maybe even a continent away. It’s amazing really.

At our company, we sell hotels and my title is a salesman. Yesterday, I just pulled our database up and went to one market, Charlotte North Carolina and decided to spend the next hour making cold calls. I started calling people that do not know me and have probably never heard of me. Once again, I was amazed at how simple and meaningful a phone call is. In a world where we are told to text or email or better yet, go to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc. as the means to contact people, the little invention from 1875 stills works today. I spoke to people that I didn’t know and they told me about their company, their plans, their goals and how we may be able to help them. I would have never received that level of feedback on an email or through a website. Things like that only happen in person or a personal phone call. This ought to be taught in today’s business schools. Ha. We could call it, “Business 101.”

In 1875 Alexander Graham Bell told Watson, “here, stretch out this cable and let’s see if this thing works.” It did. Alexander Bell being a smart man, kept it quite until he received the patent for the phone eight months later. The first bi-directional call was made on March 10, 1876 and changed the world.

Ok, so the point is, a phone call is still better than all the new technology we have today. It makes you think in real time and the party on the other end hears and understands many things that go way beyond just the words spoken. Try it, it still works. Ha. KT