Remember birthdays… because most people won’t. My friend Michael Dotterer makes at least 5 phone calls a day to wish his friends happy birthday. He does this, because whether we admit it or not, birthdays are special to people. When you remember someones’ birthday, you’ll usually get put into a special category of people. If you do this consistently, you form a special bond over a few years.
In order to wish people on their birthday, you need 2 things:
- You need to know when their birthday is &
- You need to remember it on the day of.
Let’s start with finding out the birthdays of people you know.
Step 1) Figuring Out Their Birthday
There are 6 ways I usually use to find out someones birthday:
- Ask Someone Who Knows — Do you know the office manager/wife/husband/sister/brother of your contact? Use email, SMS & phone calls to ask people the birthdays of other people. The officer manager may even have the birthday’s of a few different people you know.
- Just Ask Them — Just ask straight out: “Hey when is your birthday?” You can do it through email, SMS, on a phone call or in person. I like email. On the phone & in person, I like to ask them towards the end of a conversation. Don’t make it a big deal. It’s a simple question, looking for a simple answer. Sometimes, you will get people who will ask you “Why are you asking?” Just tell them that you want to wish them happy birthday when it comes around… or make a joke out of it if you feel like it… with something like “I’m just looking for another reason to stalk you next year.”
- Make it part of a form — If you have an agreement or form that most of your clients have to complete in order to do business with you, add Date of Birth as a field into that form. People will fill it out without thinking twice about it. You can put a small caption near it saying you want to send them a card. PS: Don’t ask for the year.
- Pay Attention — If you pay attention to people, you’ll sooner or later discover their birthday. Just today I discovered someone’s birthday because I went onto their blog. I often ask people what they did over the weekend and many times I find out it was their birthday or their spouses birthday.
- Use FaceBook – The cool thing about FaceBook.com is that you can share so many intimate things like photos, videos and more. The feature I love the most is that it asks people their date of birth right in the beginning and publishes the day & month by default. People fill it out because its part of a form. So sign up if you don’t have an account and invite people to Facebook. You get to share things with them… and you get their birthday.
- Use Plaxo – Plaxo.com (owned by Comcast) is a way to keep the information in your address book always up to date & accurate. Here’s how it works: Once you import your contacts into Plaxo, you can send people a request to update their contact info. Your contacts will get an email with asking for updated information. They’ll click on the link in the email and update their information. How does this help with finding out birthdays? There is a field to enter their birthday (with or without the specific year) and a lot of people fill this out. Best of all, Plaxo is free of charge for it’s basic service and their premium service is awesome.
Step 2) Remembering their birthday
The key with this tactic is to remember the birthday on the day of the birthday. A day late is just not good enough.
The easiest way I’ve found to consistently have impeccable memory is to add the birthdays into calendar system that will send you a reminder on your cell phone. Google Calendar makes this really easy. Outlook 2007, RememberTheMilk and other calendar systems will do a similar thing. The best thing about these calendar systems is that you set the events to be reoccurring annually, so once you set it, you don’t have to do any additional work. It will automatically send you reminders for years to come.
CALL TO ACTION
Pick 20 people from your list of people you want to build a better relationship with, find out their birthday and add them to your reminder system. Once you’ve got all 20, repeat with another 20. Before you know it, you’ll have everyone’s birthday down and you’ll be calling people daily to wish people with a birthday song. =D
You must log in to post a comment.