Heather Hutson

 4 Benefits of Giving My friends Lisa and Natalie dress up like elves, complete in silly hats, and scurry around northern suburbs of Atlanta dropping gifts on the front steps of unsuspecting recipients.  They call it #12daysofelvingchristmas.  They find someone in the community who is having a rough go of the holiday season and "elf " them - kinda like Ashton Kutcher in  "Punk'd" but much nicer.  Natalie suggested that I grab a partner and start "elfing" people in my area. So Frances and I set out with journals, and candles and CD's in pretty paper into different parts of the city.  And do you know what happened?  We had a blast.  I mean, something magical happened. Maybe it was the Christmas Spirit or the Holy Spirit or simply good mojo.  Whatever you wanna call it, we were high on it. What is that? Why do we feel so good when we are giving? I went to the Google cave to find out.  Turns out that I'm not the only person to ask this q

I was in sales back in 2001. I was calling into meeting planners at Fortune 500 companies within a 300 mile radius of Atlanta. I would cold call for hours. It was hard. Really hard. I started in November - one month after 9/11. ALL of the companies I called had a freeze on meetings and events. The whole industry sat in suspended animation for a time.  And I was a green production sales person. I had a sales manager who told me every Monday morning that I was going to lose my job if I didn't sell something soon.  It was high pressure.  This is the climate for most sales organizations within corporate America.  No one wants to hear from a high pressured sales person who's trying like mad to make a sale. I get it though, the company NEEDED me to make a sale. We needed the cash to keep the doors open.  The profits from any business that I brought in would go to feeding the company, keeping the lights on, phones ringing, pay the rent etc. Social commerce is different .