This article will appear in my “Selling Points” column in the February 2011 issue of TLT Magazine. You get a preview; after all, membership has it’s privileges!
With the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) a little over a week away, I’m being bombarded with email requests from companies and publicity firms asking me to “stop by our booth” to see the latest blah, blah, blah…
I’ve got all the emails flagged for follow-up; I know I need to get back to all of them and make the appointments and yet I can’t quite bring myself to do it, mostly because I just don’t care. Don’t get me wrong: I’m really looking forward to the show and getting the chance to see, touch and play with all the new toys that will soon hit the shelves of your local Best Buy. And I’m really looking forward to four days in Las Vegas. What I don’t care about is the hype.
I have some bad news for you: nobody, and I do mean NOBODY, cares about your new products nearly as much as you do. I know that probably comes as a bit of a shock; after all, your company may have dumped hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of dollars into researching, developing and testing that new product. You may be prepared to spend millions more on marketing it to the public. It’s sad, I know, but it doesn’t change the fact that I don’t care.
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Delivering outstanding customer service is simple: just give your customers everything they expect and then some.
If you think your customers’ expectations are too high or if you’re just not willing to make the commitment to do whatever it takes to make them happy, please don’t whine when they choose to do business with someone who will.
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OK, I really need someone to tell me where all the days are going. Have you ever seen that 80′s movie, Looker? I saw it something like two dozen times on HBO when I was a kid. The bad guys had this really cool weapon that you could point at someone and basically freeze them for a few minutes, so that when they woke up they’d feel like they had moved forward in time; you could also smack them around while they were “frozen”.
Yeah…that’s kind of what these past few weeks have been like. I keep waking up thinking “Now what the devil happened to Tuesday? I could have sworn I left it here somewhere…”
I blame The Blog Whisperer. Since that guy showed up, I’ve been introduced to the meaning of busy…and a lot of new clients. Don’t get me wrong; it’s definitely a good thing; in fact, it’s exactly what I wanted. I’m just in that adjustment period, I guess, trying to figure out how to keep everything moving forward and not lose track of anything important along the way.
I’ve written here before about the fact that I don’t really believe in work-life balance. I’ve made a conscious decision that, for the foreseeable future at least, I’m going to throw myself whole-hog into my work. It helps that I love my work; I can’t imagine I’d be as motivated to do something that I didn’t love, let alone something that I hated with every fiber of my being.
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Last week, I signed up for what looks to be a cool new service called SeededBuzz (I saw that a few of my friends had “liked” their ad on Facebook, so score 1 for the effectiveness of Facebook ads). The basic idea is that you can submit your best blog posts (called “planting a seed”) , and other bloggers can pick up on the theme and write posts of their own based on your “seed” post (otherwise known as “buzzing” your “seed”). Once you get a handle on the goofy terminology, it can be a great way to meet, connect with, and befriend other bloggers. And it works!
Meet Tia Peterson, creator of BizChickBlogs. Tia knows her stuff: she’s been designing websites and messing with WordPress since graduating college, although she won’t tell us how long ago that was. 
Her tips and advice for bloggers are spot on. I met Tia via (heh…that rhymes) SeededBuzz, and this is why I love blogging: it’s all about the connections!
Anyhow, a few weeks ago Tia wrote a post that considered the question of why so many blogs fail. I think that’s an interesting question, especially considering my new Blog Whisperer project. The reason I started MyBlogWhisperer.com was the fact that so many of the blogs I was setting up for people were left vacant once they were completed. When I would ask the owners of said blogs what was going on, I’d get different versions of the same answer: they felt like they didn’t have anything worth saying.
And I think that’s the number one reason most blogs fail: FEAR. So many of us have been filling our heads with negative self-talk for so long that we refuse to believe that anyone would want to hear anything we have to say. I’m here to tell you, though, that they do! Believe it or not, there are thousands of people just like you who are looking for someone to give voice to their thoughts and feelings. That someone can be you, if you’ll just get out of your own way.
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pos·tur·ing
1 : to assume a posture; especially : to strike a pose for effect
2 : to assume an artificial or pretended attitude
This post has been stewing in my brain for days, and I think it’s about time I get it out. If it seems a little disjointed, well, consider the source.
I’m calling out the “fake it ’til you make it crowd”; I think it’s time to put that idea to rest. While the philosophy seemed like a good one at first blush, I’m beginning to understand that “faking it” is just another way of hiding from the fear of being open, honest and transparent.
The thought is that by pretending you’ve already arrived at the destination, somehow the journey will be less arduous and time-consuming. If you’ll just act like a successful business person (i.e. “fake it”), so the theory goes, people will assume that you are a successful businessperson and will want to do business with you (i.e. you’ll “make it”). Sounds good, right? You can move to the front of the class without doing any homework or passing any tests; who wouldn’t want to do that? Where do I sign up?
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Guest Blogger Dan Waldschmidt
I’m just going to be me.
I am tired of being the person that you think I should be. I’m just going to be the best “me” possible.
And isn’t that what you really want from me?
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Carl Taylor, Entrepreneur and Author
There are a lot of websites and speakers that are trying to motivate you. They motivate you to take action, to get off your ass and achieve more. But if you’re an idiot and someone motivates you, you are now just a motivated idiot, and you are going to do idiotic things faster.
Motivated idiots are those people who go to their first property seminar, hear a sales pitch disguised as education that says you must invest right now in this off the plan unit block, immediately sign on the dotted line and a few years later wonder why they don’t have the returns they expected.
I’m not meaning to have a go at seminar selling, or even property seminars; they are viable business methods and have their place. What you should be focusing on is “their first” as in it was their first seminar. The presenter did a great job and got them motivated, but at this stage they were just a motivated idiot and they made an idiotic decision because they didn’t know what questions to ask.
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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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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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OK, first things first. I played a little hooky on the blog last week and have gone a whole twelve days without posting. I won’t bore you with the details; suffice it to say that I took on one too many projects and overwhelmed myself a bit. Oddly enough, it was nice to have so much going on.
It feels like every possible good thing is happening at once: new products are being created (and sold!) over at Great Little Book Publishing, the Motivation 101 Blog was featured in the Sacramento Bee as their “Blog of the Week” last week, and everywhere I turn, projects I’ve been working on are starting to come together better than I ever dreamed they would. I have a lot to be grateful for, no doubt, and one of the things I’m most grateful for right now in my life is the fact that people are actually interested in reading what I write.
It’s no secret to anyone here that I struggle with feelings of inadequacy from time to time. What really comes as a surprise to me, though, is how many people I meet who feel the same way.
Just tonight, I was chatting with a friend of mine who has been gearing up to launch a new coaching program that is sure to explode the business of anyone who’s fortunate enough to grab one of the 12 available spots she’ll open up later this year (and yes, that’s real scarcity because she can only work one-on-one with that many people at once). This is an extremely talented person who has demonstrated her ability to get results time and again, and yet she admitted to me that one of her most difficult challenges has been and continues to be the feeling that she’s not good enough to pull it off.
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