When I say this has been an interesting week, you should understand that I’m probably making one of the most egregious understatements of my life so far. Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that my vision of who I am and what I do has been shattered and rebuilt over the course of the past few days. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds; in fact, it was just what the doctor ordered.
For the past several years, I’ve thought of myself (and promoted myself) as something of a sales expert. I want very badly and am working very hard to travel the country and the world revitalizing the lives and careers of salespeople everywhere, to be the sales trainer of choice for organizations everywhere.
I have a great WHAT: a system I call HERO Selling, which you can learn about elsewhere on this blog. HERO Selling is, I’m sure, going to change the face of sales for decades to come. I realize that belief is stupidly optimistic, and I’m OK with that.
I also have a great HOW. My vision is to talk about the things no one else is talking about, to bring topics like character, honesty and spirituality to the forefront of the conversation about what makes a great salesperson.
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I’ve been talking to a number of new bloggers the past several weeks, and it seems that they’re all getting the same advice from the experts, namely that they should focus on providing valuable content. This might come as a surprise, but I’ve told all of them to ignore that advice. Why?
Before I tell you why, let me say for the record that I’m all for valuable content. I think valuable content is great. It’s what makes a blog worth reading. It’s what makes the internet…well, valuable. But here’s the thing: whether or not you provide valuable content is entirely secondary to what really matters: whether or not you’re interesting.
That’s why I tell people to ignore the advice about valuable content, at least at the beginning. The directive to “provide valuable content” bogs down a lot of new, and even seasoned, bloggers because they end up spending all their time trying to figure out what readers will find “valuable” instead of actually writing anything. Readers can never be interested in, and never, ever find value in what never gets written.
The same is true in sales. I’ve seen salespeople who are completely obsessed with creating the perfect script to use when they make calls or deliver presentations. In fact, they get so obsessed that they never actually get around to calling, let alone making any presentations. Again, the desire to provide value gets in the way of actually delivering something valuable.
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For over a century, since the invention of selling as a profession, really, salespeople have been looking for the secret formula that would get more customers to buy. They’ve developed sales processes and interview practices and presentation styles and closing techniques, and still they’re frustrated by the lack of results. Countless millions of dollars are spent every year on books and training programs in an effort to uncover the secret to sales success.
Well, today is your lucky day: I’m going to tell you the secret to selling more than you ever have before, and I’m not even going to charge you for the information. Sounds good? Okay, here we go.
Before we get to it, though, let me warn you right now that you’re not going to believe that it could be so easy and obvious, which may cause you to ignore what I’m about to say. Don’t ignore it, though. Do your best to quiet the part of your brain that’s going to resist. Take some time to evaluate the information, answer the questions presented, and see for yourself whether it makes a difference in your results. If it doesn’t feel free to come back and call me an idiot…but not before you’ve tried it out. So now, here we go:
Do something you believe in.
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There is a question everyone in business for themselves should consider: “How do I treat my Super Patrons?”
What is a Super Patron? The “Super Patron” is the model customer, someone who not only values your product or service; they don’t only religiously visit your blog, website, store or place of business. The Super Patron sees the true value in what you have to offer and appreciates it so much that they promote you and your business to their family and friends. They go to serious trouble to be sure that the people around them at least try your goods or services for themselves.
Unfortunately, because the Super Patron is so rare, they can sometimes be lost in the shuffle, being seen as simply a “good customer”. There is an easy way to tell a good customer from a Super Patron. A good customer comes to you when they need something. Once their needs are satisfied, “thank yous” are exchanged and until next time, communication is severed.
A Super Patron does more. They introduce you to those close to them and most likely, show their gratitude in some way: they give you referrals. They pass on information that could be of value to you and your business. Even small thank you gifts or cards, while rare, are not unheard of.
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A lot of people responded to a post I wrote last week about marketing like a douchebag. The post was written in response to an e-mail I received from someone who wanted me to come to a “herd building day” at an upcoming seminar he’s hosting.
While much of the feedback I received was in the form of objections to the use of the “d-word”, there were a couple of questions that jumped out at me that I wanted to take a few minutes to address. WARNING: the aforementioned “d-word” might pop up a couple of times in this post, so I’ll get that one out of the way first.
Question: Why did you describe the offending info-marketer as a “douchebag”? Answer: First of all, it has nothing to do with the fact that he’s an information marketer. I have no problem with information marketers, especially since I consider myself to be one…or at least I’m testing the waters. What I object to, and what inspired the name-calling, is bad information marketing practices. More on that later. The reason I used the word “douchebag” is that’s the only one I could think of that captured the visceral reaction I’d had to the email I’d received. I spent a good two minutes trying to find another word that captured the feeling. I couldn’t. Moving on.
Question: What is a “herd building day”? Answer: I have no idea. I tried to figure it out, but the page that the email linked to had very little information about what the event actually entails. Maybe you can figure it out. I’m not going to dignify the page with a link; just google “herd building day” (with the quotes); it’ll be the link right under the post from this blog.
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I’m going nuts trying to track down a video on YouTube, or anywhere for that matter. It’s an MTV commercial from the early 90s; in it, there are two punk rockers, a boy and a girl, sitting on a curb.
The boy complains, “Nobody likes me.”
The girl replies, “I like you Oliver.”
After a long pause, the boy responds, “Nobody good likes me.”
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Wow…what an incredible day. I’m still in Nashville attending the Robin Robins IT Marketing Bootcamp, and I have to say that today was a game changer for me. Mostly, the presenters just made a lot of sense: everything they said was stuff I know and talk about, but it really sunk in on a deeper level for me.
Me and Dave Crenshaw, author of The Myth of Multitasking
The day kicked off with Dave Crenshaw, author of “The Myth of Multitasking”. Dave talked about the negative impact the myth of multitasking has had on our society, a familiar subject to regular readers of this blog (see the blog post “The M-Myth” and the podcast “The Myth of Multitasking”). Dave’s insights into the workings of the human brain were fascinating, and it was great to learn that there is hope even for a mess like me.
Dave divides people into three categories: the Zen Master (you know the ones: always on time and organized to a sickening degree), the Prodigal (those who were organized at one time but have fallen into a pattern of disorder) and the Pig-Pens (people like me and Dave who are inherently chaotic and disorganized). Each deals with the chaos of life in their own way, but all of us have the same problem: only 24 hours in the day.
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Joel D Canfield, The Commonsense Entrepreneur
***Note from Jerry: I’m looking forward to a lively debate on this one. My friend, Joel D Canfield, wrote this post. I’m guessing some of you will have an opinion you’d like to share with Joel. I certainly do. I’ll withhold mine for a couple of days to allow the debate to run its course, then chime in with a post of my own in response (just because we’re friends doesn’t mean we always see eye-to-eye). Only one rule: play nice. Let your voice be heard, but please do it respectfully. Let the games begin! ***
As I sit here waiting for my computer to finally open this image for editing, I ponder my control issues.
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We interrupt this blog’s 5-part series about getting to “No” to bring you this special “American Idol” update:
American Idol kicked off their “Top 24″ phase tonight, and watching the ladies perform tonight got me thinking.
This is supposed to be when the contestants bust out their “A” games and show the audience what they’re made of. It didn’t happen tonight. Instead, I saw 12 girls make the same mistake made every year: instead of engaging with their audience, they picked songs they thought would make them look good. Do you smell a business lesson coming?
At this point in the competition, the audience hasn’t had much of a chance to form an opinion about the contestants. There’s no history, no relationship. We don’t know them yet. This is really our first impression; we’ve yet to hear a full performance, only snippets played between clips of their family or kids or dogs or whatever “human” element the producers thought would make for good TV.
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