Immediacy has made things difficult for some professions. But it has also presented new opportunities to other professions. Sales, in its broadest sense, seems to have evolved alongside immediacy to reach the point where it is today. As such, the section that follows is specifically offered to those readers who are interested in sales and selling.

At one point in the history of selling (ideas, learning, services, products), we went door‐to‐door. Sometimes we carried our goods with us, sometimes we tried to convince people to place orders that would later be shipped. Often we performed a demo on the spot.

Now, we live and work in a far more complicated way. Sometimes, though rarely, we go door‐to‐door. Often we go screen‐to‐screen. Or face‐to‐face‐to‐screen.

We have sold in the same era where presidential debates were run face‐to‐face, and in parallel via websites and social media platforms.

Where people showed up for the game but stayed for the commentary.

Where the primary source was sought, but the secondary source was sometimes coveted or paid attention because it offered more of the story, more of the context.

As a seller (of ideas, learning, services, products), we have to be willing and able to juggle multiple learning conversations, across multiple platforms. We have to be in all of them, all conversation streams.

Or rather, we only have to if we want to catch the proverbial fish, which jumps from stream to stream with ease and abandon.

Use Feedback to Extend Your Platform

Sales, too, can be enhanced by the deepest underpinning of immediacy: feedback. We have more to wring from it before turning our attention elsewhere.

First, as has been mentioned, feedback is optimized when it arrives in the right dose, at the right time. We have all had moments where we were simply not ready to hear what was good for us and so swatted away crucial lessons. On the other end, we have all delivered feedback at the wrong time, pushing our recipient into a defensive posture, again minimizing the impact of the lesson.

Second, and also crucial, is that feedback, done well, helps both the receiver and the giver. Not all feedback is good feedback; not all feedback is equally valuable; not all feedback will result in learning (Hattie, 2012). So you can't just throw it around like fertilizer and expect all the weeds to die and all the plants to, in turn, flourish. In fact, one of the most valuable aspects of good feedback is the effect that it has, to continue the metaphor, not on the weeds and the plants but on the thrower of the fertilizer – you.

Taken together, these pillars of effective feedback – dosage, timing, and reciprocity – help us to notice the value of an immediacy at play in businesses that rely on multisided marketplaces, bringing to a fine focus much of what we have been discussing in this book: leading, selling, training, and servicing. If a company were to identify a way to get in the middle of the feedback that flows between two parties, helping each side to benefit in a way that they couldn't without the middle‐ground platform, then a business serving a multisided marketplace would be born (Evans, 2003).

We studied our first multisided platform and marketplace when we interviewed Jason Chicola, the founder of Rev. Chicola didn't set out to build a transcription service that would serve journalists and writers and television producers. (Rev also handled closed captioning.) He set out to answer an entirely different question: “How do we create jobs where people will work from home?” (Valentine, 2016).

Years later, as the company continued to improve and add marketshare, Chicola and his team paid attention to the customer experience, without question, but they invested a lot of time improving the experience for their freelancers, too. The platform, Rev, gained in value as it made the transaction between customers and freelancers more seamless, more immediate, more delightful.

Inputs, requests, outputs, tweaks, modifications: all pointed to a world where the customer received information at the time when he or she could best make use of it, and the customer's interactions within the ecosystem sent important data back to the producer on the other side to then make adjustments on her end. A good immediacy system: it's like an endless game of tennis, one that serves both the server and the served, allowing for a deep commitment to iteration, to adjustment. The platform is the court and the net. And the platform might even go so far as to provide continually improved racquets and balls, water between sets, perhaps a rabid crowd to motivate the players. It hosts the game, really.

Though that analogy started to get a little bit out of control near its end, it is really not too much of a stretch.

We really stretched when we spoke with Owen Jennings, product manager at Cash App, a service that, among other features, lets its customers send money to one another and order a free customizable Visa debit card to spend their balance. Boost, a product launched in May 2018, allows customers to receive instant discounts on that debit card. So, for instance, if you swiped the debit card at a Chipotle, and had selected the Chipotle Boost, you could immediately receive 10% back on your card. Jennings and his team are building a classic multisided platform where the customer receives the discount, the business receives customer acquisition and retention benefits, and Cash App gets the engagement and growth benefits of being “the card for a certain business” (e.g., The Lyft Card or the Chipotle Card).

According to Jennings, “Immediacy was the thing that was at the top of mind when they were building Boost.”

It allowed him to see a competitive advantage. Some companies, even some of the major players in the industry, had simply not seen – or found a way to leverage – immediacy. If you think of Boost as a rewards program for Cash App and then put it up against other rewards programs, you can see the immediacy play clearly. According to Jennings:

The way that the card offers landscape works right now is that there are basically three models, and one of them we've kind of invented.

The first model is credit cards. You accumulate points over time, and after you've accumulated 137,000 points you can go and trade those points in for a certain benefit at an unknown or at least obfuscated exchange rate. So you can take your 137,000 Chase Sapphire miles and buy a plane ticket and that plane ticket costs 50,000 miles and maybe last week it cost 30,000 and next week it will cost 80,000. No one really knows.

Or, the other model is with card‐linked offers. There are all of these apps that do card‐linked offers where you put a credit or debit card that you have into the app, and it gives you offers. If you guys use Uber, there's Visa Local offers in the Uber app. So if you link your Visa card to Uber, they'll say, “Hey, there's a Thai restaurant near you, get 10% off.” The way that works is, you link your card, you make your transaction, and then there's a statement review, 7 or 30 days later, that says, “Did Owen make a transaction at Lemongrass Thai? If yes, then give him a credit back to the account a week later or a month later.” That experience is not optimal, I think, mostly because it's not immediate and so you're not engaging with your customers at the right time. That was one of the things that we wanted to fix. (Personal statement, 2018)

Of course, the “fix” is similar with feedback and students. Timely feedback is key. It can be used to cause the right adjustment at the right time, to benefit the student, helping her do her work better, and the teacher, helping her do her job better, and the school, helping it to meet its mission better. And the key hinge is really feedback and assessment and most likely formative assessment, in the moment, when the stakes are low.

And so, the experience with Boost is that you add a Boost to your card. Right, so you put the 10% off at Chipotle on your card, and when you go to make a transaction for $10, you're actually only paying the discounted amount. So you can think of it as an instant discount or instant cashback. We've toyed with framing both of those for marketing perspective. But we're giving you the benefit right then and there.

The difference between getting a dollar off your coffee, everyday, instantly, at the point of purchase is totally different than saving up points for a month and then trading them in for $3 and getting that credited to your account a month later.

We've rolled out a debit card, and it's among the fastest growing debit cards in the US right now, and part of the reason it's so attractive is because if a friend pays you $50 to split dinner, you can then spend it instantly. So the entire concept around Cash App is instant, because people need instant access to their money. That's less conceptual about how people interact with each other and more like an artifact of the fact that people need money now. (Jennings, personal statement, 2018)

The transaction, being more immediate, is also good for brands. If a credit card company has to complete a statement review that takes, say, 30 days, before offering something back to clients as reward for shopping at a certain place, that certain place loses the impact.

If you're giving the discount 29 or 37 days later, the customer has already completely forgotten about the transaction, they're never looking at their online banking statement, they're never seeing that Uber gave them that benefit. And so there's no brand recognition improvement and there's very limited customer acquisition and retention benefit, it's just something that happens in the background.

Boost used the tools of immediacy to make a deep impact. Text message, push notifications, information‐rich receipts, sounds: “There's a whole experience that says, ‘Hey, you just got a dollar off at this coffee shop.’” (Jennings, Personal statement, 2018)

But they did not stop there. Most people and businesses can access those things, can use those things, but like a good multisided platform, Boost realized that it had to develop a better instrument (a better tennis court, racquet, ball, crowd) if they truly wanted to influence the quality and joy of the game for its participants.

Every other company is basically taking your PAN (primary account number, your credit card number) and matching it to a MID (which is a merchant identification number) and then ad hoc saying, oh yeah, give them a dollar, a week or a month later. We, however, built our own proprietary merchant graph so we know who our merchants are and can therefore apply an instant discount – a Boost – in basically real time. No one else has done this. No one else is offering instant discounts like this. (Jennings, personal statement, 2018)

Boost's example may be tough to duplicate in its details, but the model it suggests is broadly applicable. The most attainable insight from Jennings' story is simple: consider tightening feedback loops between a company's agents and a company's customers.

For example, in typical sales motions, it might be hard to resist the urge to call up a customer who has not yet signed a purchase agreement and has not responded to your follow‐up emails. The problem is that either the agreement is not a priority (i.e., the prospect is weaker than you thought) or the communication approach was flawed from the start in trying to get that document signed. If the customer was indeed interested, while you have him or her on the line initially, you could send (and confirm receipt) of some calendar events that will serve as landmarks or beacons in the closing of the sales process. Those alerts would then pop up (for him or her or for his or her assistant), helping to prompt a kind of response based on an initial commitment. If the person declines that option, he or she is declining a situation wherein both customer and seller would receive information at the optimal time, signaling that he or she may not ever have been that interested in the sales motion.

Or, if you supervise a team that frequently gives estimates to clients, insist that they write up their estimates and send them to both the potential customer and someone in the central office who is tasked with following up within a set amount of time. Critically, the follow‐up should happen with both the customer and the worker, so that neither loses track of the potential project. You could certainly build an automated system that sits in the middle of all of these people and flags reminders, but you can also run your reminder system through a simple calendar book and an organized and efficient office manager.