So, starting today, I’m going to clearly delineate my interests by my projects and other interests. It’s still all on one blog – but separate by categories for those only interested in one of the subjects.

There is now a category for my “Honey Project”, “Tutoring Company”, “Sales and Marketing, Startup Operations”, and “All Other.”

In the last several weeks, there’ve been two that have been eating up most of my free time: tutoring and honey.

My tutoring company, No Excuses Tutoring, has had an unexpected bump in activity recently. I had several web leads that came in, and as a result I found 3 more students to tutor this semester. Which meant that I had to go out and find/vet/interview tutors for them, and in general become more serious about the company. This of course is great news, and my next challenge is making the website better. Easier to find on Google, easier to navigate and more focused in terms of what the company is and why it exists.

The other project, has been to help a local beekeeper sell honey to new, and hopefully more upscale, markets. The first thing we did is re-label the honey. In order to differentiate honey from all of the other honey options out there, we decided to tell a story of what makes the this honey special. Through the new label of Grampa’s Gourmet we can tell the story of a multi-generational beekeeper based in a unique location (San Luis Valley) – and attract a higher price as a result. I’ve been busy building the website, and looking for partnerships with other companies to sell the honey.

Excel works well for most quick tasks – but how cool would it be to be able to create interactive, colorful charts that breathe life into rows and rows of data?

And speaking of  FlowingData, they have nice beginner’s guides to get started:

What Visualization Tool/Software Should You Use? – Getting Started

40 Essential Tools and Resources to Visualize Data

Simply Honey’s owner and sole employee is Brent Edelen, a third generation bee keeper. He has between 500 and 600 colonies that he moves to New Mexico in the cold months, and brings back to the San Luis Valley in the summer.

Brent let me taste four different types of honey: Clover, Tamarisk, Starthisle and Wildflower. By far the most interesting honey was the Tamarisk. The color of the Tamarisk honey jars is almost black, and it has a very distinct flavor.

I also experienced eating a raw honey comb for the first time in my life. It’s gooey, and the sweetness explodes in your mouth unexpectedly as the hexagonal wax cells all burst when you chew them.

Below are some pictures I took from the excursion.

As it looks like I will be getting more and more involved with helping Brent bring the honey to a new market, I will be writing more about Simply Honey, bee keeping and all matters of honey in general.

Brent of Simply Honey shows how he cuts out the honeycomb.

A frame still full of honey.

The finished product comes in a beautiful case.

Abandoned bee keeping supplies and barrels, once full of honey.

Amazing views of the Sange de Cristo Mountains.

Now that I’ve been with the company for almost 7 months, I thought I’d share the activity dataset. In the graph below, you’ll see the following stats for each day (outbound and inbound activity):

• Email: how many email I wrote,
• Call – No Message: how many calls I made in which no one picked up and I didn’t leave a message,
• Call – Left Message: how messages I left,
• Call – With: how many meaningful conversations I’ve had about whether it’s an opp or not
• Call: All other types of calls (getting to the right person).

You’ll also see that during the course of the last 7 months, I’ve switched strategies in how I approach my job, twice. The first few months, my strategy was to get a hold of someone, no matter how many calls it took. I also didn’t leave any messages, because I thought it would be a waste of time (people almost never call back).

After about two months of relentless calling (and following the advice of my manager), I switched tactics, and started leaving voice messages every time I called someone for the first time. I also tightened my “abandon” criteria – meaning I stopped hounding people until they answered the phone – I would call, leave a message, follow up by email and be done with it.

Tracking daily activity in Sales

By tightening the abandon criteria, I can reach out to a lot more people, and by leaving a message, hope for a better chance that they will notice my outreach.

And the most recent change in strategy (after I got back from vacation) was prompted on my own, with the realization that my goal should be to maximize the number of people I reach out to everyday. With the help of a lot of email templates, I can now send out a lot more email per day, and call to leave a message only to the most promising prospects.

Notice that there is a crucial piece of data missing above. I left out the outcomes data on purpose. The data above is real, and I don’t want to in anyway compromise my current employer’s competitive status by revealing too much information.

What do you think? Have you been able to extract useful strategic information by analyzing daily sales tasks data?

The reality of course is that ideas are cheap. Everyone has ideas – and just about everyone’s got that one killer idea they will someday implement and be wildly successful. But almost no one does.

The reason is that acting on an idea is very different than having one.

Implementing, even seemigly trivial ideas, takes time, money and tremendous amount of effort.

And the best way to make sure that your idea has any chance of succeeding to get help from other people, which requires you to share the diea with others.

I may be naive, but I think that the best thing you can do with an idea is share it with anyone who is willing to listen.

I find it a professional, and a polite thing to do.

But it’s a surprising easy question to mess up.

Word Choice

For one thing, the words you use matter. For example, if you say “Did I reach you at a good time?”, it immediately begs the question – when is a good time? There is never a good time.

Conversely, you can’t ask if it’s a bad time (even worse “Are you busy?”). It’s always a bad time.

So what I say is “Did I reach you at an OK time?” and most people, being reasonable, submit to me that yes, it is an OK time.

Tone

Another important aspect of the question is tone. If I sound at all scripted, I can almost hear the person on the other line shut down: here we go, another annoying sales call. To avoid this, the question must come out naturally – not too fast, and not too confidently. It has to sound genuine.

Sentence Structure

How you position the question also matters. For example, if you say “Hi, this is Joe Shmoe calling from such and such, did I reach you at an OK time?” it sounds almost too pushy. I find that it turns people off because they can’t honestly answer that question. OK time for what? If I don’t give them an idea of why I am calling before asking that question, I am implicitly suggesting to them that they are about to be sold to. In fact if you use this form, the most common response that you’ll get is “OK time for what?” which puts you in the defensive position.

Instead, I try to give a hint as to why I am calling “Hi, this is Joe Shmoe calling from such and such. I am following up with you from such and such a conference. Did I reach you at an OK time?” or “Hi —. I was referred to you by John Doe. Did I reach you at an OK time?”

Of course, this forces you to have a reason to call. What if you are cold calling? What if there is no conference to mention, and you are not callilng on a referral? Just a straight cold call? I still try to condense the purpose of the call “I am calling regarding [insert topic]” or “I am calling to follow up on my emails”. I find that almost anything is better than not giving them a heads up as to why you are calling.

At least these are the things that’ve worked for me. What do you guys think?

First, let’s acknowledge that email marketing is really easy:

1. Buy a list of contacts from a vendor
2. Load them in an email marketing software package
3. Blast em, blast em, blast em,
4. Sort through the replies
5. Collect money from those who happend to need what you are selling at the time
6. Repeat.

Let’s also acknowledge that calling this  practice “email marketing” is misleading – it already has a name: it’s called SPAMMING.
Now, I’d like to make a few observations from having spammed in real life:

• It works. You blast 3,000 people with a sales pitch and 5 will turn up as a potential opportunity for your sales team.
  • Think about it, you didn’t have to really do any work. Just sit back, let the blasts happen and collect hot leads.
• It’s very obnoxious.
  • You just wasted the time of the other 2,995 people who did not appreciate getting your unsolicited email. Let’s assume that it took each of them (on average) 5 seconds to glanse at the email and recognize for what it is. 5 second multiplied by 2,995 people equals 14,975 seconds. That’s 4.1 hours. 4.1 hours of work that you took away from your potential customers. Let’s assume that you potential customers are Directors of IT (as it is in my case) who make $100,000/year or almost $50/hour. You know where I am going with this. 4 hours at $50/hour makes $200, that you just stole/wasted from your customers.
  • By this reasoning, blasting 3,000 people = wasting $200 of your potential customers money. But who sends out only 3,000 emails? What if you send out 100,000 emails? That’s almost $7,000 of damages that you inflicted on the people you should care about the most. And that’s not including the opportunity cost to them.
• Everyone does it
  • With the assumption that for every 3,000 blasted, 5 might buy, blasing 100,000 could result in almost 160 potentials deals. Which could result in significant revenue for your company.
• Most expect it.
  • This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of spamming. The majority of the people that I’ve spoken with, who are on the receiving end of business spam, expect it, and treat as a normal part of life. Just a part of doing business.

Given that it works, and that the reciepients expect it, I still can’t seem to come to terms with it. I like to tell my co-workers that I feel like a part of me dies everytime we do a blast.

What do you think? What’s your experience with marketing this way, and do you see anything wrong with it?

The point is that you need to get into your customer’s heads and figure out what differentiates you (your company/products/services) from the competition and why your customers buy from you. Then in your cold call opening, lead with that differentiator and/or that reason. Once you are able to stop making your offering into a commodity and instead focus on the value, your prospects will respond.

While at Three Value Logic, I learned that the first 10 – 20 seconds of a call are the most important, and really determine the ultimate outcome of the call. I’ll have more to say on this point later.