Re-discovered this today:

About this presentation

Bestselling author and entrepreneur Seth Godin outlines a common creative affliction: sabotaging our projects just before we show them to the world. Godin targets our “lizard brain” as the source of these primal doubts, and implores us to “thrash at the beginning” of projects so that we can ship on time and on budget.

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.

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?

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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?

For the last year and a half, since officially moving to Denver, I’ve been working for a corporate benefits consulting/brockerage firm. When I think back to two years ago when I applied and accepted the job, it’s not hard to see why I did it. I was completely broke, in a job that was about to self-implode (consulting contract expiring), and looking for a ‘real job’ in Denver. The company offered a great salary, had stellar staff and as an added bonus, it was physically very close to where I was living at the time. So I didn’t care that I knew nothing about the insurance industry, or whether that was something I wanted to learn more about.

Long story short, at the end of last year I decided that I should really think long-term and do something that I could really be passionate about.  And, as I’ll elaborate more on in future posts, I decided that I want to work for a technology startup.

What kind of people work in a tech start up scene? That’s a very broad category of companies and people, but generally speaking, and for the purpose of this post, I see following type of people:

• creative founder – the person who was a great idea and the know how to make it work;
•  investor – who have the money the passion/vision for the idea;
•  engineers/technical – who do the actual work of building/researching/day-to-day implementation of the original idea;
•  business- who help the enterprise actually function as a profitable business (marketing, sales, accounting, etc..)

Within those rough categories of people, the only one that really appeals to me is the businessman, and more particularly the salesman of the org.

I can really see myself falling in love with a technology, and working hard to make other people see what I see. I have the technical background and the people skills to do it. 

So what am I waiting for?

While I am not part of any start-up or internet company, I still felt very energized and inspired by all the cool new products demos  I saw. The enthusiasm of the crowd was very contagious. I will definitely go again.