A Fool With a Tool is Still a Fool

A fool with a tool is still a fool.

Me using a Weed Whacker? Nah, I can handle that. Me after logging into my website control panel or trying to build a half decent Facebook Business page? Yep, that’s me as a fool.

Last week one of our customers said, “I so cherished the time with my marketing advisor because heck, a fool with a tool is still a fool”. Everyone in the room nodded a collective head in agreement.

It was beautiful.

And timely. Because right now is when to amp things up in small business that people cherish given the sketchy economy the confusingmarketing world we live in.

Small Business success is a lot of things and successful Marketing is a big piece of it. But successfulmarketing, (no matter how much we want it to be), is not a commodity, or a widget or something that spits out of an assembly line.

Successful Small Businessmarketing is not just about using 3 random “tools” like Groupon, Emailmarketing and Pay Per Click plus 4 platforms, 5 posts, a bucket of content and a prayer. Those are, without superb advice and counsel, just shiny and trendymarketing tools fluttering about meaninglessly unconnected and ineffective.

Here is the truth; successfulmarketing is a science. It has a formula, a cadence, a structure and a path.

And it needs to be learned. And it needs to be taught. And it needs to be studied. And in this ever changingmarketing space, it needs to be continuously learned, taught and studied.

And it’s not just onlinemarketing that needs the learnin’. How to use demographic data to determine mailing lists, how to network in local business groups or how to use QR codes on your business cards or better, how to connect online and offlinemarketing really well is not all that crystal clear for many small businesses either.

So if you are a small business owner or someone who helps them, quit obsessing with the marketing “tools” and realize that the lead story is the insight you need to use them.

We fall into this trap in many parts of our working lives. It’s easy but foolhardy to just see the “Whats” and grab on to those tools be they online or offlinemarketing wizardry or even sales tools like CRMs and online Demos. It’s harder yet smarter to see, get or teach to the “How” of using these tools well.

Insight, in the eyes of those who need it most it seems, is the most cherished tool of all.

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

The Most Powerful Phrase in Sales

It’s the most powerful phrase in Marketing too.

It’s shocking how many of us in Sales forget to use it. Marketing folks forget it it too but not as often as they tend to proof stuff before prospects or customers see or hear anything.

Why we sales people forget it all the time is another blog for another day but what you must do now with this most powerful of phrases is jump on it and start using it today, this hour and in as many ways and places as you can.

The world is eating this phrase up right now. It’s never been hotter. Ever.

Interestingly the key to this is not rooted in what everyone thinks are the pillars of sales success like “Solving a problem” or ” Filling a need” or “Asking great questions” or even “Focusing on your customer”

This phrase is not about your customer. It’s not about you, your company or your product either.

And what’s really really cool about this powerful phrase is that it is easier than ever for you to use it. There’s more evidence to cite it, examples to help frame it, places and spaces to preach it, teach it and shout it out from the top of your cubicle, desk or chair.

It’s simple too. Here it is.

“What most people….”

What most people…What most people…. Say it with me, “What most people..!!”

Ahhhh.

Powerful. Add “do” or your favorite action word or words – it doesn’t matter-and it all becomes gold! . What most people “say”, “ask”, “wonder”, “start with”, “buy”, “think about”, “try”.

The phrase is not about you. It’s not about the customer or the prospect either- it’s about people like them.

That is powerful. That gets attention. That starts and moves sales. That works.

We are sheep. I’ve written and shared studies with all of you on how powerful what most people do is. We want to see the most fans on Facebook, the most likes, the ratings, what others bought, the plus 1’s, the followers on Twitter. It’s all the same thing. What most people do is what I the consumer or the business owner wants to know.

I’m no fool. Not every customer will follow mindlessly like sheep do. But I guarantee the phrase gets the head and heart to at least listen to what you have to say – and that is half the battle.

Work it in to your phone calls and presentations and not just around “What most people buy is“. It’s smart, effective and the most powerful phrase in sales.

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

Consistency

Seems like not everyone “gets it” these days.

Open your shop 15 minutes late or have your product fail, or disconnect a caller even once and those prospects that were waiting in your parking lot, or considering the upgrade or just looking for pricing won’t come back like they used to.

It’s too easy to go somewhere else.

And it’s easier now to tattle on your inconsistencies, making even infrequent inconsistency seem like an epidemic.

Consistency isn’t sexy like your Groupon Sales plan or your YouTube buzz, yet its absence more than ever, can kill your wildest of business dreams.

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

Mondays are busy. All Monday posts are 100 words or less.

Inside Thoughts

I suspect some things are better left unsaid.

I know this when my 14 year old son, mortified about something I’ve just uttered, hangs his head and tells me, “Dad, I think that….. was an inside thought.”

Here are 6 random thoughts that probably should have stayed inside but if they did, there would be no blog today.

I saw those “End of the World 5.21.11” Billboards over the last few months while traveling but no lie, I did not make the connection to the Rapture thing until this last Sunday – I thought they were just an ad for new movie coming out.

I think Old School Prospecting is dead. Really dead; not even a fundamental anymore. New School Prospecting today is about giving something of value freely first – be it product, information, kindness, advice or a stick of gum. But it won’t be just “give free” for long – soon enough we’ll all have to Future School it and “buy” the right to be heard all the time. I’m OK with that.

I worry that someday I’m going to watch TV and see my headless body walking down the street (“Hey, that’s my shirt! Hey, I have those same pants! Hey that’s (gulp) me!”) as Eyewitness News does yet another story on obesity zeroing in on those fat belly close ups.

Consensus decision making is overrated. It has its place but an important decision or action that takes 5 times longer when 8 to 80 people get involved is a problem. Add to that, that the quality of that decision often degrades with everyone “giving in” along the way, ending in a watered down decision or plan. Some decisions are better made by just you with whatever degree of input you want or need. That goes for buyers, sellers and everyone in between.

Who decided so many years ago that people who answer a phone should enter orders or update screens? Isn’t the skill of verbal communication something to rethink as far as value goes? Answer the phones hands free! – The art of the language and the phrase. What could we do with an obsession and admiration of that?

Phone selling is going away. It’s coming full circle. Years ago it was always face to face and before you know it, it will be again. Smile at your Tablet folks, your non verbal expressions are going to matter again!

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

Lyrical

I remember fighting off my brothers and diving for that sports section each morning. I loved to read his columns.

What a thrill to meet him last week.

“I try to be lyrical” he told me about his sports writing. “But today nobody really cares about that – just bang it out.”

Sad. Great communication is lyrical. It has a cadence; it captures hearts, minds and dollars.

And it will come back.

Great communication skill of all types will matter again as soon as we get past this giddy era of dumping content anywhere and in anyway we can.

Be ready.

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

****

Mondays are busy. All Monday posts are 100 words or less.

98 Words on That Ringing In Your Ear

Someday not far off, that phone will ring in your office or in your ear but it won’t ring because someone wants to place an order or because someone wants more information about your product or service. Those days are fading away.

Someday that phone will ring because someone has an important business problem; a marketing, sales, service, security or even reputation problem and doesn’t know what to do, where to start or how to fix it. And that someone will need a talented, brilliant person to help them.

When that phone rings then, will you answer it?

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

****

Mondays are busy. All Monday posts are 100 words or less.

I Love Dirty Jobs

I love Discovery TV’s Dirty Jobs.

They are always looking for new ideas for those dirty jobs. I wonder if I should send a note to the producers and invite them to come out my way.

Dirty Jobs is a popular show where host Mike Rowe performs some of the most difficult and frankly, disgusting jobs done by real people. These jobs run the gamut from the needed cleaning of shipping lane buoys ( crusted molting squishy marine life that needs to be chiseled off) to scuba diving for hippo poop at a zoo ( where else is it going to go?) and everything in between.

My wife loves Dirty Jobs too but I think she’s just in love with Mike Rowe. He’s funny, smart and good looking. Whenever the show pops on she’ll stop whatever she is doing and say “Oh, my Michael is on.” Once, as she sat next to me on the couch watching the show, she began think out loud and dreamily blathered to nobody in particular, “I wonder if he’s married.” (He isn’t).

Mike might be a smoldering hunk of handsomeness to some but truth is Dirty Jobs is a tribute to the people who do these jobs. Mike Rowe simply adores these folks and it shows. Most are people take great pride in either the “dirty job” at hand or they take pride in that the dirty job is just part of a larger endeavor that needs to get done right. We here in our work have some jobs like these. Jobs that are difficult and tough and hard and done by prideful, caring people. They may lack the “ick” factor for TV but I’m betting they’d be some of the toughest work Mike and crew would love to try.

Selling On The Phone: Lots of rejection. Lots of pressure. Lots of importance. Mike and crew would arrive and he’d strap on a headset and give selling a good try. And he’d fail. He’s get a lot of “no’s” and even more “annoyed” customers. He’d get the kind of rejection Mike probably isn’t used to being a TV star and all. But that’s OK because he would spend time with the pros who do sell well and then cut to a new scene where he’d share what he learned and say “It’s not really “selling” with these sales people, it’s more like they are helping out someone”.

Training: Especially the “stand up in the classroom 10 hour day with the adults” kind. This is simply exhausting stuff. You have to be “on” all day. Be on target, on message, on time and totally on hand with people who all learn differently and bring and array of attitudes to the party. We’d give Mike a couple of hours to prep and have him lead the class. By4 o’clock he’d be triple dog tired and barely able to speak. No worries though, he’d turn slightly, smile into the camera and tell us how “crazy and tough” real trainers need to be to make learning happen.

Team Leader: They’re the boss, the support, the help desk, the number watcher (and often the number cruncher), the master listener, the coach and oh by the way, they have one of the most difficult professions in the world; continually improving the performance of people (and sometimes 30+ people at a time). Mike would set up in a cube and start leadering’ and Boom he gets an irate customer, then the system crashes ( everyone on paper!), the mid day numbers deadline comes and goes and then his boss walks by wondering where first pass of all the employee reviews are. That’s enough and as Mike’s head is nodding in surrender he looks up at the camera and says “Boss’s day only comes once a year? What a rip off!”

I think the producers of Dirty Jobs would like the opportunity to come here. If they decide to come, do me a favor and keep it just between us. My wife doesn’t need to know.

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

Larry Bird?

image credit retroplanet.com

There’s a board game called TriBond where you identify the commonality of three clues given. It’s pretty fun.

Last weekend, my 14 year old son was given these three:

“Big…Larry….Jay”

He correctly said “Bird”. Then asked, “I know Big Bird and a Jay Bird, but what the heck is a “Larry Bird”?

Sigh.

Wow.

What else do I incorrectly assume is a basic reference with someone I know well? Or with colleagues, employees or customers?

It’s worse than that actually.

I assume this blog makes sense to you. But how many are saying “Who the heck is Larry Bird?”

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

****

Mondays are busy. All Monday posts are 100 words or less.

A Training Veteran

I flew on Monday.

He was a talker. We discovered we were both in Training.

I’m not often speechless. But with Dennis I was all ears.

He’d been in training for 40 years and was heading home. It was his last trip he said. He was retiring from the game.

His big thing about training was the customers. Not the learners so much – but the customers of those learners. That’s what drove him. All his years of training was for them. It made sense.

Don’t get me wrong, he loved the learners too. He spent his life figuring out the best way to teach and shared that in the end, it was the work ethic of the students themselves and their willingness to practice that made all the difference in the world. That made sense too.

Testing was an obsession with him. In his training experience, knowing and certifying for absolutely sure that his charges understood the content and could prove it not just in class but in the field months later, was critical. Made perfect sense.

You see, we are both in training. So I get at the most basic level what that means, how important it can be and how hard it is to do.

But I train stuff that just helps people. Dennis trains stuff that saves lives.

Dennis was on his way back from another year in Afghanistan. He was a former military man now working for the Department of Defense and the Training leader of a bomb finding dog training school saving the lives of American soldiers with his Belgian and German Shepherds clearing roads by sniffing out IED’s.

While the odd commonalities of our training worlds struck me, it was of course the differences that made me speechless.

“It’s tough, one of my crew lost both of his legs three weeks ago in a remote detonation and his dog took a lot of shrapnel. They’ll both be OK…. ” He stopped, leaned forward and looked beyond me out the window.

“Oh my, look at the grass, look at the trees…” he said with a voice trailing a bit as we neared landing. His eyes were misting perhaps an understandable mixture of sadness and joy.

“Vietnam, Panama, Desert Storm, Desert Shield…and all that sand and all that nothingness….It is so good to be getting home.”

When we landed and I thanked him for all those years of service he just shook my hand, winked and smiled. It occurred to me that perhaps Dennis was not really that much of a talker after all and given the troops he trained – didn’t need to be. That today on this flight, maybe he just needed to talk.

Maybe I was just lucky enough to have the honor and the privilege of sitting next to an incredible trainer on a very special day of his invaluable life.

Thank you Dennis. Thank you.

About Face

Let’s pretend you are just like this handsome dude in the picture; a guy, single, and in a bar. And it’s 80’s night.

Your name, as always and of course is…Rock Ledger. (Just go with me on this – my blog, my rules).

Even though you are still a certified Sales legend, these are not Good Times in the romance department.

Things are so bad that one woman said “No” to a date with you, even after you handed her 2 concert tickets, promised you wouldn’t bother to show up and that you’d never contact her again.

You don’t understand what’s happened to you! You have never had these kinds of problems in the singles scene before. Heck, your buddies named you years ago, “The Other Rock Legend”. Maybe you’re in a rut. Maybe the world is changing and your approach has to be different. Maybe it’s just a run of bad luck. Real bad luck.

Despite the cool Tears for Fears music, you’ve had it. You get up to leave. But then..…

…….She ……slowly…..walks…..by………

She is stunning. She is more than stunning…… she is amazing.

She actually turns around ……………….and looks at you.

You realize your mouth is awkwardly agape as you bask in the awesomeness of her beauty. So you snap it shut, straighten up and give her The Look. (The Look of course, was invented by you back in the day. It’s the one in which the left eyebrow arches, the head bobs with a half smile that says, “Hi there, I am Rock Ledger, and you deserve me).

It worked! She starts to walk over to you.

Good Times are back.

Her name is Cassandra and well; you are feeling good so you’ll spring for something special. You motion to Marty that you’re moving “uptown” now and will pass on the normal Bud Lite cuz’ for the lady, only Bud Lime will do.

“You are so beautiful” you tell her. And she is. “You’re so beautiful that you don’t even need much make-up”. You can feel you are getting your groove back now. She smiles sweetly and takes a sip of her Bud Lime.

You are a romantic guy so you keep on with the sweet talk. “Not much make-up at all Cassandra.” She smiles again. You know it’s a great move to get her to talk about herself, so you ask a good one. “Are you happy with the way your face looks now?”

“Excuse me?” she says.

You reply “No, what I’m saying is I’ve seen a lot of other women ….do like a whole total makeover thing on their faces and even look more beautiful than ever.”

“Are you talking about my FACE!” she cries. “What is wrong with my FACE?!” a little louder.

You’re thinking maybe you are in a little trouble but this is the best you’ve done in a while so you keep on keeping on.

“Cassandra, your face is beautiful. I bet everyone loves your face and knows your face, but you have had that look for a long time. I think I have a few good ideas you might like if you want to you know, freshen it up a little bit.”

She stares at you.

Yep. You suspect that now you are in fact, still in a rut. Deep in a rut.

Cassandra slams her Bud Lime bottle on top of yours and as that explodes all over you and the bar, she takes the rest of her bottle and dumps it on your head.

Good Times no more.

*******

I needn’t beat you over the head with the lesson we learned at the bar today. So I’ll keep it brief.

Cassandra has a face and a business has face. And both are things you as sales people, consultants and advisors need to be very careful about.

That face is very important to a business owner, especially if that business is small to medium sized. Be it the logo, the website, the facebook or LinkedIn page, the storefront, brand promise, the status in the community, the unique services they provide or the colors, the cars, or even the style of the owner- it’s all a crital “face” of the business.

And it can be that personal.

If you are in the business of helping businesses get better and or change; be careful how you go about messing with the “face” of that business.

Small business owners in particular are a prideful ego-laden bunch. You can’t talk like Rock Ledger did here (yes that picture is really me, but the nickname..not so much) and suggest tactlessly a business makeover, a switch in strategy or revamp of their websites or marketing plans – whether you’re a marketing consultant, a printer or software salesperson. If you do, trouble might brew (pun intended :)).

Whenever you foster change a business, especially a smaller one, you can be changing that “face” of the client. Be smart about it. Do it wrong and it can go very wrong. It’s not taboo – It’s just different.

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

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