2012 Google Model Your Town Competition

[Cross-posted from the SketchUp blog]

Following the success of last year’s Google Model Your Town competition, today we’re launching the second Google Model Your Town Competition. Model Your Town is about geo-modeling – making photo-textured models of real-life buildings that appear in Google Earth. The Model Your Town Competition is also a chance to celebrate your town by adding it to the 3D map. Of course, the USD$25,000 for a local school/district is a nice incentive too.

Barranco, Lima, Peru


The Model Your Town Competition is open to just about everyone, just about everywhere in the world. Form a team, model buildings (using SketchUp or Building Maker) and upload them by the end of February 2012.

You can model as many structures as you like – which types of buildings you choose to include is entirely up to you. The important thing is that your choices say something about the character and history of your town.

If your town wins, a bunch of us from the SketchUp team will visit, throw you a dinner party and do our best to make you feel like the local hero that you truly are. Check out the competition website for details, and start rounding up teammates!

Learn more at Your World in 3D, then get started modeling your town!

Kierkegaard on Sparks and Momentum

“A road well begun is the battle half won. The important thing is to make a beginning and get under way.”

–Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
Danish philosopher and writer

Top 3 activities that can hobble a salesday…

  1. Talking with people who can’t move the sales process along
  2. Unnecessary research activitiesWhat’s too much? There’s really no definitive answer. It’s particular to your sales world. Many people start to get a gut feel for when they should move on. The key is to act on it and make the call (rather than making sure every little thing is known before the call – fine line, of course). You might be surprised what you can learn by asking a straightforward question of the person who answers the phone or responds to an email.
  3. “Crafting” or “drafting” a script, email, or letter

Needs to be done, but almost never during the money hours.

Always remember… A real sales day is made of contact with people. Avoid the hobble.

 


 
 
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Barton on Pushing It

“The big rewards come to
those who travel the second, undemanded mile.”

–Bruce Barton (1886–1967)
American advertising executive
U.S. congressman

Sales challenge…

What if you checked email only 3 times a day?

For about a month and a half, we’ve been doing this as a team at JustSell to see if it helps us.

The rules…

Check and handle email upon arrival then check and handle email at lunch. Check and handle email after 4 pm. At home, check it all you’d like (but hopefully that won’t be more than once a day).

Here’s what we’ve learned so far…

  • We recognized our addiction to checking email.
  • We identified how it became a default task (automatically checking it when returning from a discussion, meeting, trip to the bathroom, etc.).
  • We saw how we sometimes used it to hide out from our more important work (“If I’m addressing email, I’m doing something. It may not be the most important thing in the long term but at least I’m of use at this moment.” – Do you see the problem with this thinking?).
  • We learned that our email could wait* and that as the day came to an end, we were more productive and happier. (Although the first few days were very uncomfortable and had us oddly distracted by our lack of distraction.)

It’s cwazy**…

Why is it that we would allow ourselves to be distracted from what we rationally know to be our more important work that gets us closer to our goal of making good things happen?

(how to check email 3 times a day)

* Our customer service people check email hourly in order to be sure we’re addressing customer needs quickly. We don’t believe we’ve lost any sales and we’ve had no negative feedback on our response times.

** And if we still have your attention… This spelling of the word indicates a deeper level of crazy – so cwazy that we’d spell it cwazy. You think that’s crazy?

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