Gamma Power

I found an incredibly interesting site today that should be on the research list of all marketers. 

“Meet the Gamma Woman:  a newly defined influential power.  Her strength comes from her far-reaching social networks.  When she finds something she likes, she doesn’t just embrace it, she creates a groundswell.  And, with 55 million Gammas out there, that’s a force you can’t ignore.

The Gamma woman stands in the center of a web of positive personal connections: she aims to bring out the best in herself and others. Her sense of self is guided by her internal beliefs, passions, and priorities. She is motivated by the desire to interact, rather than to impress. She is her family’s strong center, her friends’ trusted ally, and she models the change she wants to see in the world.

Key characteristics of the Gamma woman:
-  Collaborative and inclusive
-  Feels empowered by information
-  Values relationships of all kinds
-  Defines success for herself

What do Marketers need to know?
The Gamma Factor identifies a hidden power in the women’s market—a dynamic group of women who interact with and influence a wide network of consumers, who generate and disseminate trends and new ideas, and whose social behavior and media habits reflect a new marketplace and marketing model.

Gamma women represent 51% of all women in America.*  As a majority market that acts in many ways like a psychographic segment, they share a set of attitudes and behaviors that can be marketed to with specific messaging and techniques. Understanding how Gammas connect and interact can also give marketers insight into how information travels in the new media landscape.

* What Do Women Want? Study, Meredith and NBC Universal, 2008

Because many marketers are still concentrating their efforts on reaching the Alpha mentality, those who go after Gammas have an early-to-market advantage. To tap into the power of this consumer, speak her language—understand what’s important to her, how she uses media and finds information, and which messages resonate most strongly with her.

Keys to Gamma Marketing:
-  Pull her in to interact with your brand.
-  Inspire her with real stories and distinctive characters.
-  Be authentic.
-  Ask her to share her opinions, needs, and wants.
-  Spark her creativity. Invite her to participate in creating your brand’s story.
-  Use multiple media and marketing techniques.
-  Show her your values.
-  Don’t be afraid to take risks or make course corrections.
-  Tap into interest groups and influential individual voices.
-  Create adventures and unique experiences.
-  Help her edit the wide array of choices.

This company is entirely produced by Meredith which is one of the nation’s leading media and marketing companies with businesses centering on magazine and book publishing, television broadcasting, integrated marketing and interactive media.  The Meredith Publishing Group features 26 subscription magazines - including Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, MORE, Parents, Fitness, and American Baby - and approximately 200 special interest publications.  Meredith owns 12 television stations, including properties in top-25 markets such as Atlanta, Phoenix and Portland. 

 

The Technician Addiction

The E-Myth business notion (of which Wendistry is a HUGE fan!) of working “ON it not IN it” has to be, by far, the most unanimously embraced concept and seemingly, the most elusive.  Having the realization that you may actually have to leave it (work) in order to work on the business is both eye-opening and can be quite scary.  Here’s a story:

Meet the wise and brave Insurance Agent.  He decided that it was time he became an Insurance Business Owner. Don’t misunderstand – he had owned the business for years and had built a very successful practice – a place the Technician in him could freely practice technical work without the interference of a boss. At first, it was freeing and satisfying for him but later it became overwhelming and binding. He described the feeling he had when he stayed up all night reading The E-Myth Revisited and felt the excitement of a way out. As a result of reading the book, he decided he would start thinking more like an Entrepreneur and less like a Technician and would commit time daily to work on his business too. Years went by, and he became accustomed to the idea of working on it, of having a business that was self sustaining but the idea never manifested into anything more than an idea and a few random documented systems.

Finally, tired of the routine, tired of feeling trapped with no apparent end in sight – he decided to make the boldest, scariest move that a Technician can make; he decided to stop doing technical work – cold turkey! He committed to leaving the business for six weeks and focus completely on the business of building a business that works. He would spend the next six weeks in the library doing the strategic work of working on his business – or at least attempt to. He described the expectation he had that the business would suffer in new revenue and policy holders in the short-term and of the discomfort his staff and his wife at home would have during these six weeks. What he didn’t expect was that the person who would suffer the most and have the most discomfort was himself.

As any addict knows, detox is a hard journey and it is certainly no different for a “technical work” addict. The first few days away from the business in the library were painful. He didn’t know what to do with himself. Where would he start? What did it really mean to think strategically and systemically? Maybe he was a man without a vision and if so, what did that mean? He ached for the experience of feeling productive – of winning a new client or even answering the phone. He wondered what was happening in the business and questioned his sanity for even thinking of leaving it. Did he really want to blow up his life? What a mess! He decided after two days of torture that he would give himself until the end of the week and if nothing happened by then, he would return to the comfort and safety of the technical work on Monday.

Thursday morning came and he arrived at the library at 8:30 am as he had for the three previous days. But this morning he felt different. He felt a clarity he hadn’t experienced before. The day-to-day detail of the business seemed smaller while the overall function of an insurance business seemed larger. He felt lighter and in an odd way empty of the need to get to work - at least in the way he used to. Objective at last, he began working on his business.

A NEW PERSPECTIVE
At the end of the six weeks, three unexpected results happened. First, his business did not lose revenue; in fact, it increased compared to the same time period the year before. Second, his staff had been more productive in his absence than ever before. They embraced the opportunity to rise to the occasion and enjoyed the experience of not having a technician for a boss. And third, he found that he was not the same person.

He defined being productive in an entirely new way:

• His business looked different – He saw the business as a highly functioning network of systems.
• His clients looked different – He could see his target market with clarity and had a new-found passion to better shape the business to serve them.
• His financials looked different – They painted a picture of the overall performance of the business and he embraced that information rather than hiding from it.
• His employees and his future employees looked different – He could see their potential and what he could – and should – expect from them.
• His life looked different – He could see the life he had created for himself and could now envision the life he wanted to intentionally create.
                           The Insurance Agent finally became an Insurance Business Owner.

Sometimes, we have to leave the business, vacate the comfort of our offices and daily interruptions to be able to see our businesses objectively. Strategic work is difficult and does not come easy to most. The Insurance Agent had to leave his business to get the strategic perspective he knew he needed.

Once he did, he knew he could never go back to the reality of his “Technician’s Addiction.” Sometimes the best thing you can do to work on your business is to free yourself from the technical reality of the day-to-day for a period of time – stop cold turkey – to leverage the entrepreneurial perspective in a different environment, and then come back to the business on your own terms, as an Entrepreneurial Leader.

by Wendy Vinson in the E-Myth Blog 

Stooooopid… Why the Google Generation isn’t as Smart as it thinks

The digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate.

On Wednesday I received 72 e-mails, not counting junk, and only two text messages. It was a quiet day but, then again, I’m not including the telephone calls. I’m also not including the deafening and pointless announcements on a train journey to Wakefield – use a screen, jerks – the piercingly loud telephone conversations of unsocialised adults and the screaming of untamed brats. And, come to think of it, why not include the junk e-mails? They also interrupt. There were 38. Oh, and I’d better throw in the 400-odd news alerts that I receive from all the websites I monitor via my iPhone.

I was – the irony! – trying to read a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. Crushed in my train, I had become the embodiment of T S Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: “Distracted from distraction by distraction”. This is, you might think, a pretty standard, vaguely comic vignette of modern life – man harassed by self-inflicted technology. And so it is. We’re all distracted, we’re all interrupted. How foolish we are! But, listen carefully, it’s killing me and it’s killing you.

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995, his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.

The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

The same thing happens if you talk on a mobile phone while driving – even legally with a hands-free kit. You listen to language on the phone and lose the ability to take in the language of road signs. Worst of all is if your caller describes something visual, a wallpaper pattern, a view. As you imagine this, your visual channel gets clogged and you start losing your sense of the road ahead. Distraction kills – you or others.

Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal.

Meyer tells me that he sees part of his job as warning as many people as possible of the dangers of the distracted world we are creating. Other voices, particularly in America, have joined the chorus of dismay. Jackson’s book warns of a new Dark Age: “As our attentional skills are squandered, we are plunging into a culture of mistrust, skimming and a dehumanising merger between man and machine.”

Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, has just written The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardises Our Future. He portrays a bibliophobic generation of teens, incapable of sustaining concentration long enough to read a book. And learning a poem by heart just strikes them as dumb.

In an influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is Google making us stupid?” Carr, a chronic distractee like the rest of us, noticed that he was finding it increasingly difficult to immerse himself in a book or a long article – “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Instead he now Googles his way though life, scanning and skimming, not pausing to think, to absorb. He feels himself being hollowed out by “the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’”.

“The important thing,” he tells me, “is that we now go outside of ourselves to make all the connections that we used to make inside of ourselves.” The attending self is enfeebled as its functions are transferred to cyberspace.

“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have lost,” says Bill McKibben, the great environmentalist.

McKibben’s hero is Henry Thoreau, who, in the 19th century, cut himself off from the distractions of industrialising America to live in quiet contemplation by Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He was, says McKibben, “incredibly prescient.” McKibben can’t live that life, though. He must organise his global warming campaigns through the internet and suffer and react to the beeping pleading of the incoming e-mail.

“I feel that much of my life is ebbing away in the tide of minute-by-minute distraction . . . I’m not certain what the effect on the world will be. But psychologists do say that intense close engagement with things does provide the most human satisfaction.” The psychologists are right. McKibben describes himself as “loving novelty” and yet “craving depth”, the contemporary predicament in a nutshell.

Ironically, the companies most active in denying us our craving for depth, the great distracters – Microsoft, Google, IBM, Apple, Intel – are trying to do something about this. They have formed the Information Overload Research Group, “dedicated to promoting solutions to e-mail overload and interruptions”. None of this will work, of course, because of the overwhelming economic forces involved. People make big money out of distracting us. So what can be done?

The first issue is the determination of the distracters to create young distractees. Television was the first culprit. Tests clearly show that a switched-on television reduces the quality and quantity of interaction between children and their parents. The internet multiplies the effect a thousandfold. Paradoxically, the supreme information provider also has the effect of reducing information intake.

Bauerlein is 49. As a child, he says, he learned about the Vietnam war from Walter Cronkite, the great television news anchor of the time. Now teenagers just go to their laptops on coming home from school and sink into their online cocoon. But this isn’t the informational paradise dreamt of by Bill Gates and Google: 90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks. They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”.

“They don’t,” says Bauerlein, “grow up.” They are “living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are now”.

The hyper-connectivity of the young is bewildering. Jackson tells me that one study looked at five years of e-mail activity of a 24-year-old. He was found to have connections with 11.7m people. Most of these connections would be pretty threadbare. But that, in a way, is the point. All internet connections are threadbare. They lack the complexity and depth of real-world interactions. This is concealed by the language.

Join Facebook or MySpace and you suddenly have “friends” all over the place. Of course, you don’t. These are just casual, tenuous electronic pings. Nothing could be further removed from the idea of friendship.

These connections are severed as quickly as they are taken up – with the click of a mouse. Jackson and everyone else I spoke to was alarmed by the potential impact on real-world relationships. Teenagers are being groomed to think others can be picked up on a whim and dropped because of a mood or some slight offence. The fear is that the idea of sticking with another through thick and thin – the very essence of friendship and love – will come to seem absurd, uncool, meaningless.

One irony that lies behind all this is the myth that children are good at this stuff. Adults often joke that their 10-year-old has to fix the computer. But it’s not true. Studies show older people are generally more adept with computers than younger. This is because, like all multitaskers, the kids are deluding themselves into thinking that busy-ness is depth when, in fact, they are skimming the surface of cyberspace as surely as they are skimming the surface of life. It takes an adult imagination to discriminate, to make judgments; and those are the only skills that really matter.

The concern of all these writers and thinkers is that it is precisely these skills that will vanish from the world as we become infantilised cyber-serfs, our entertainments and impulses maintained and controlled by the techno-geek aristocracy. They have all noted – either in themselves or in others – diminishing attention spans, inability to focus, a loss of the meditative mode. “I can’t read War and Peace any more,” confessed one of Carr’s friends. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

The computer is training us not to attend, to drown in the sea of information rather than to swim. Jackson thinks this can be fixed. The brain is malleable. Just as it can be trained to be distracted, so it can be trained to pay attention. Education and work can be restructured to teach and propagate the skills of concentration and focus. People can be taught to turn off, to ignore the beep and the ping.

Bauerlein, dismayed by his distracted students, is not optimistic. Multiple distraction might, he admits, be a phase, and in time society will self-correct. But the sheer power of the forces of distraction is such that he thinks this will not happen.

This, for him, puts democracy at risk. It is a form of government that puts “a heavy burden of responsibility on our citizens”. But if they think Paris is in England and they can’t find Iraq on a map because their world is a social network of “friends” – examples of appalling ignorance recently found in American teenagers – how can they be expected to shoulder that burden?

This may all be a moral panic, a severe case of the older generation wagging its finger at the young. It was ever thus. But what is new is the assiduity with which companies and institutions are selling us the tools of distraction. Every new device on the market is, to return to Eliot, “Filled with fancies and empty of meaning / Tumid apathy with no concentration”.

These things do make our lives easier, but only by destroying the very selves that should be protesting at every distraction, demanding peace, quiet and contemplation. The distracters have product to shift, and it’s shifting. On the train to Wakefield, with my new 3G iPhone, distracted from distraction by distraction, I saw the future and, to my horror, it worked.

Taken from The Times Online in the U.K.  Article by Brian Appleyard. 

What Nobody Tells You About Selling

I hear clients say to me all the time, “I hate selling.  I don’t know what to say and how to say it, and I don’t want people to think of me as a salesperson.”

Here’s a secret… A few years ago I said the same thing to myself.  In fact, many, if not most, people who aren’t in sales feel the same way.  What IS it about selling that most people don’t like? 

Ask yourself what exactly do you associate with “sales people?”  Do the words pushy and tricky and manipulative come to mind?  Mention the word SALES and the stereotypical used car dealer used to pop into my head, too.  I’m sure such people actually exist… and I hope not.

Now, imagine for a minute that you didn’t have to be pushy, tricky or deceitful to sell.  Imagine that you could be honest, direct, and enjoy the sales process.  I know… it’s a big leap, but how about this…

Do you like helping people?  Do you enjoy seeing people go away happy with the proper solution to their problems?  If you answered yes to either of these questions, then you’re born to sell because selling isn’t about forcing people to buy.  It’s about:

• Helping prospects get what they want
• Helping prospects get what they truly need
• Helping prospects get what they deserve
• Helping prospects feel safe and secure with their buying decision

Imagine that you work in a restaurant, you’ve got a customer at your table.  How would you behave?  Do you launch into a pitch about the “special of the day” and tell them that they should order that and only that?  Of course not, you mention the specials of course, but you ASK them what they are in the mood for; are they celebrating a special occasion; does anyone at the table have a food allergy you should be aware of; would they be interested in viewing the wine list; etc.  While selling products/services can be more complicated, basically, everyone is hungry and selling is about satisfying that hunger the right way.

Your prospects not only want a problem solved, they want help in identifying the best, most economical, fastest, sexiest, most extravagant, most glamorous, quickest, slowest, etc. way to do it.  And, when you do, they won’t see you as pushy or sneaky.  They’ll think you’re the best thing that ever happened to them to help them get what they want. 

 

 

 

The Social Media Hype is Over

It’s time to create real value from online customer interactions.  Here’s how:

The tools of social media– blogs, mashups, podcasts, wikis, and widgets– sound more like characters from a fantasy novel than business tools.  But, these tools are what will shape Internet marketing in the years to come.  Already, hundreds of millions of people belong to social networks, thousands of blogs are created daily, and YouTube videos often rack up millions of hits over a few days or weeks.

However, this cultural phenomenon caught much of the business world by surprise.  Marketers are now scrambling to understand what it is, what it means for their businesses, and why customers are changing their habits to use these new tools.  Social Media is the buzzword du jour, which leads to a fluid definition of what it is as both startups and established companies all try to capitalize on consumers’ ever-increasing interest in it.

While there is no secret formula that encompasses all of the technologies available to businesses, thinking about social media tools as different means for achieving familiar objectives helps eliminate the mystery surrounding them. 

FUNCTION	OBJECTIVE	SOCIAL APPLICATION	SUCCESS METRICS
Research	Listening	Communities / Brand monitoring	Insights gained
Marketing	Talking	Blogs / Social networks	Awareness, sales revenues
Sales	Energizing	Communities / Widgets	Members, buzz
Support	Supporting	Forums / Wikis	Drop in calls
Development	Embracing	Communities / Suggestions	Development speed

 

Measuring participation is what makes social media different from traditional advertising and marketing, but there’s no universal way to do so.  Which measurement is most effective depends on each company’s goals.  Number of members, postings, comments, time on the site, and the results of customer surveys can all measure engagement, awareness and brand affinity.  Like any audience, online communities don’t populate all at once… it takes time to build interest.  And, as with any CRM strategy, the key is to know what the customer wants, design a strategy that creates value for the customer and the organization, and then select technology to best support it. 

 

5 Reasons Why CMOs Will Move into the Corner Office

or, “CEO’s heirs apparent?  Clearly, the CMOs”

Handle the brand, and you can handle the top post.  One major influence has been the flawed accounting practice that ignored brands’ asset capabilities and held marketing communications in a second-tier rank within the corporate hierarchy.  Branding is now accountable because it no doubt contributes significantly to company value.  CEOs and Chief Financial Officers are now recognizing brand value as an asset that can be managed for growth. 

If you objectively analyze the CMO’s job and correlations to CEO-job requirements become quite clear.  CMOs are required to benchmark all business units market by market around the world, align the CEO’s vision with company culture and business processes, and consistently communicate this information to all stakeholders.  They need to project and justify budgets based on sound principles and to forecast return on investment.  And, they need to be sure all these activities contributeto the positive financial performance of the company, which includes increasing revenue and contributing in a measurable way to stock-market performance.  If this isn’t ideal training for the CEO position, I don’t know what is.

1.  Traditional accounting standards are passe’  New “fair-value” accounting methods will emphasize corporate growth on intangible assets.  Assets that used to be called goodwill are now understood to compose the corporate brand.

2.  CMOs are responsible for managing both product brands and the corporate brand  Understanding both side of this dual, value-creating equation provides a unique opportunity to harness the power of the money machine called the corporation.

3.  In their role, CMOs gain wider point of view of the corporation  than executives who are in the traditional management tracks to the CEO position.  Very few leaders who come from other disciplines have such a panoramic perspective. 

4.  CMOs have inquiring minds and are willing to try new things that will enhance the business  They also understand how to limit risk by testing marketing before larger bets are made.  There will be fewer bet the company gambles with a CMO at the helm.

5.  Boards are now more interested and responsible for examining the whole corporate panorama,  so they need a CEO who can paint the vision of the future and describe how all the parts are functioning for the good of the whole.  CMOs are well trained to articulate a vision. 

 

 

~Birthday Vacation Tomorrow~

Yes, it’s THAT time of year again… My official birth date is Monday, July 21st.  I am heading out tomorrow for five days in San Francisco, so this is the last blog entry until I return next Wednesday. 

In honor of all births, deaths, and the life we live in between, I’d like to share a story told to me by a very dear friend:

On the first day of school our professor introduced himself and challenged us to get to know someone we didn’t already know in class. I stood up to look around when a gentle hand touched my shoulder.

I turned around to find a wrinkled, little old lady beaming up at me with a smile that lit up her entire being.

She said, “Hi handsome. My name is Rose.  I’m eighty-seven years old. Can I give you a hug?” I laughed and enthusiastically responded, “Of course you may!” and she gave me a giant hug.

I asked, “Why are you in college at such a young, innocent age?”

She jokingly replied, “I’m here to meet a rich husband, get married, and have a couple of kids …”

“No seriously,” I asked. I was curious what may have motivated her to be taking on this great challenge at her age.

She responded, “I always dreamed of having a college education and now I’m getting one!” she shared with me.

After class we walked to the Student Union building and shared a chocolate milkshake.

We became instant friends. Every day for the next 3 months we would leave class together and talk non-stop. I was always mesmerized listening to this wonderful “time machine” as she shared her wisdom and amazing life experiences with me.

Over the course of the year, Rose became a campus icon as she easily made friends wherever she went. She loved to dress up and she reveled in the attention bestowed upon her from the other students. She was living it up.

At the end of the semester we invited Rose to speak at our football banquet.

I’ll never forget what she taught us. She was introduced and stepped up to the podium. As she began to deliver her prepared speech, she dropped her 3X5 index cards on the floor.

Frustrated and a little embarrassed she leaned into the microphone and simply said, “I’m sorry I’m so jittery. I gave up beer for Lent and this whiskey is killing me! I’ll never get my speech back in order now, so allow me to share with you what I know.”

As we laughed she cleared her throat and began …

“We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing.

There are only 3 secrets to staying young, being happy, and achieving great success. You must laugh and find humor every day. You’ve got to have a dream.  When you lose your dreams, you die.

We have so many people walking around who are dead and don’t even know it!

There is the huge difference between growing older and growing up.

If you are 19 and lie in bed for one year and don’t do one productive thing, you will turn 20 years old. If I’m 87 and stay in bed for a year and never do anything I will turn 88.

Anybody can grow older – it doesn’t take talent or ability to grow old. The idea is to grow up by always finding opportunity in change – to have no regrets.

The elderly usually don’t have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do. The only people who fear death are those with regrets.”

She concluded her speech by courageously singing “The Rose” …

She challenged each of us to study the lyrics and live them out in our daily lives.

At the end of the year, Rose finished the college degree she had begun all those years ago.

One week after graduation Rose died very peacefully in her sleep.

Over 2,000 college students attended her funeral in tribute to the wonderful woman who taught by example that it’s never too late to be all you can be.

These words are passed along in loving memory of ROSE.

REMEMBER, GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY. GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL.
We make a LIVING by what we get – we make a LIFE by what we give.

10 Ways to Improve Client Relationships

One thing is true for all consultants:  If we have any work, we have clients.  And, one of our most important roles is to maintain and enhance our relationship with them.  Preserving those relationships is good for referrals and future business, as well as making the time spent on the project more satisfying.  Here are 10 suggestions to help you foster those important business relationships.

1.  Have a clear contract with your client:  It’s critical to have a clear understanding up front with your client about what your role is and isn’t.  You and your client should know when the project will be over and how you will measure success.  The better the client understands your role, the better they’ll feel about paying the bill.

2.  Get to know your client better:  All relationships are better when the individuals involved take the time to know one another.  Learn the client’s interests.  The fact that they like gourmet French food, exotic candies, or the Oakland Raiders is information you should know.  You will spend many hour with the client during the project so think about how you would like to be treated and then reciprocate.

3.  Ask more questions:  When we ask questions, we understand situations better.  Make the time to ask your client how they feel and how they think, and let them share their observations regarding the progress of the project and your performance.

4.  Be willing to say no:  In many cases, clients ask us to do things beyond our capabilities or interests.  When these new requests are outside the contract agreement, don’t be afraid to say, “I’m just not the person to perform that service.”  Don’t automatically say yes just because, “The customer is always right.”  (Please refer to yesterday’s post:  #10) 

5.  Be willing to say yes:  After weighing the opportunity the client offers you, say yes to the jobs that are within your capability but will require you to work a little harder than usual.  The client will be grateful and you will expand your skill set.  The more work you do on the client’s behalf, the more valuable you become. 

6.  Be a problem solver:  Clients hire consultants to help them solve problems.  The more problems we can solve, the better.  Sometimes our activities allow us to see things that can be helpful to the client.  Weigh the opportunities, and when appropriate, help out.

7.  Keep your distance:  Therapists say you can’t help the family if you are a part of the family.  This is true for consultants as well.  We do become more valuable the more we work for an organization, but we need to keep our role clearly defined.  Even as we build relationships, we need to be diligent about keeping distance so we can continue to provide valued “outside” expertise and advice.

8.  Stay focused:  Staying focused on your contract and on your deliverables is the best thing you can do to maintain and build your client relationship.  When we deliver what we say when we say we’ll deliver it, we build our credibility.

9.  Be a learner:  Being a learner means being open to new approaches and looking at each project with fresh eyes.  Few things will turn off a client more than if you immediately snap to a solution, assuming that their situation is “just like” five others you have seen.  There are always nuances that will make a difference. 

10.  Work at it:  Recognize that the client relationship is part of the job.  Managing that relationship and all the key stakeholders will make you more successful in the current project, enhance your chance for future work, and build your reputation in the entire industry. 

 

11 Tenets for Reaching (or Doubling) Profitability in 3 Months

Continued from yesterday… a return-to-basics call that gives permission to do the uncommon to achieve the uncommon: consistent profitability (or doubling of it) in 3 months or less.

6.  Repitition is Usually Redundant- Good Advertising Works the First Time:  Use direct response advertising (call-to-action to a phone number or web site) that is uniquely trackable, fully accountable advertising, instead of image advertising, unless others are prepurchasing to offset the cost (e.g. “If you prepurchase 300 units, we’ll feature you store/URL/phone exclusively in a full-page ad in…”).  Don’t listen to advertising salespeople who tell you that 3, 7, or 27 exposures are needed before someone will act on an advertisement.  Well-designed and well-targeted advertising works the first time.  Cancel anything that cannot be justified with a trackable ROI.

7.  Limit Downside to Ensure Upside- Sacrifice Margin for Safety:  Don’t manufacture product in large quantities to increase margin unless your product and marketing are tested and ready for roll-out without changes.  If a limited number of prototypes cost $10 per piece to manufacture and sell for $11 each, that’s fine for the initial testing period, and essential for limiting downside.  Sacrifice margin TEMPORARILY for the testing phase, and avoid potentially fatal upfront overcommitments.

8.  Negotiate Late- Make Others Negotiate Against Themselves:  Never make a first offer when purchasing.  Flinch after the first offer (”$3,000!?!” followed by pure silence, which uncomfortable salespeople fill by dropping the price once), let people negotiate against themselves (”Is that really the best you can offer?” elicits at least one additional drop in price), then “bracket.”  If they end up at $2,000 and you want to pay $1,500, offer $1,250.  They’ll counter with approximately $1,750, to which you respond:  “I’ll tell you what… let’s just split the difference.  I’ll overnight FedEx you a check and we can call it a day.”  End result?  Exactly what you wanted- $1,500.

9.  Hyperactivity vs. Productivity- 80/20 and Pareto’s Law:  Being busy is not the same as being productive.  Forget about the startup overwork ethic that people wear as a badge of honor… get analytical.  The 80/20 principle, also known as Pareto’s Law, dictates that 80% of your desired outcomes are the result of 20% of your activities and inputs.  Once per week, stop putting out fires for an afternoon and run the numbers to ensure you’re place effort in high-yield areas.  What 20% of customers/products/regions are producing 80% of the profit?  What are the factors that could account for this? 

10.  The Customer is NOT Always Right- “Fire” High-Maintenance Customers:  Not all customers are created equal.  Apply the 80/20 principle to time consumption, also.  What 20% of people are consuming 80% of your time?  Put high-maintenance, low-profit customers on auto-pilot… process orders but don’t pursue them or check up on them.  “Fire” high-maintenance, high-profit customers by sending a memo/email/letter detailing how a change in the business model requires a few new policies:  how often and how to communicate, standardized pricing and order process, etc.  Indicate that, for those clients whose needs are incompatible with these new policies, you are happy to introduce other providers.  You may be thinking, “But, what if my largest customer consumes all of my time?”  Recognize that 1) without time, you cannot scale your company (and, oftentime, life) beyond that customer, and 2) people, even good people, will unknowingly abuse your time to the extent that you let them.

11.  Deadlines over Details- Test Reliability Before Capability:  Skills are overrated.  Perfect products delivered past deadline kill companies faster than decent products delivered on-time.  Test someone’s ability to deliver on a specific and tight deadline before hiring them based on a dazzling portfolio.  Products can be fixed as long as you have cash-flow, and bugs are forgiven, but missing deadlines is often fatal.  Calvin Coolidge once said that nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.  I would add that the seconf most common is smart people who think their IQ or resume justifies delivering late.

originally by Tim Ferriss  www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog

11 Tenets for Reaching (or Doubling) Profitability in 3 Months

The financial goal of a startup should be simple:  profit in the least time with the least effort.  Not more customers, not more revenue, not more offices or more employees… more PROFIT.

Based on Tim Ferriss’ interviews with high-performing CEOs in more than a dozen countries, here are the 11 basic tenets of the “Margin Manifesto”… a return-to-basics call that gives permission to do the uncommon to achieve the uncommon:  consistent profitability (or doubling of it) in 3 months or less. 

1.  Niche is the New Big- The Lavish Dwarf Entertainment Rule:  Several years ago, an investment banker was jailed for trade violations.  He was caught partly due to his lavish parties on yachts, often featuring hired dwarves.  The owner of the dwarf rental company, Danny Black, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying: “Some people are just into lavish dwarf entertainment.”  (Is that the quote of the year, or WHAT?!?!)  Niche is the new big.  But, here’s the secret… it’s possible to niche market and mass sell.  iPod commercials don’t feature dancing 50-year olds, they feature hip and fit 20-30-somethings, but everyone and his grandmother wants to feel youthful and hip, so they strap on Nanos and call themselves Apple converts.  Who you portray in your marketing isn’t necessarily the only demographics who buys your product.  It’s often the demographic that most people want to identify with or belong to.  The target isn’t the market.  No one aspires to be the bland average, so don’t water down messaging to appeal to everyone… it will end up attracting no one.

2.  Revisit Drucker- What Gets Measured Gets Managed:  Measure compulsively.  Useful metrics to track, besides the usual operational statistics, include CPO (”Cost-Per-Order,” which includes advertising, fulfillment and expected returns, chargebacks, and bad debt), ad allowable (the max you can spend on an advertisement and expect breakeven), MER (media efficiency ratio), and projected lifetime value (LV) given return rates and reorder percentages. 

3.  Pricing before Product- Plan Distribution First:  Is your pricing scalable?  Many companies will sell direct-to-consumer by necessity in early stages, only to realize that their margins can’t accommodate resellers and distributors when they come knocking.  If you have a 40% profit margin and a distributor needs a 70% discount to sell into wholesale accounts, you’re forever limited to direct-to-consumer… unless you increase your pricing and margins.  Look for hidden costs by interviewing those who have done it:  will you need to pay for co-op advertising, offer rebates for bulk purchases, or pay for shelfspace or featured placement? 

4.  Less is MORE- Limiting Distribution to Increase Profit:  Is more distribution automatically better?  No.  Uncontrolled distribution leads to all manner of headache and profit-bleeding, most often related to rogue discounters.  Reseller A lowers pricing to compete with online discounter B, and the price cutting continues until neither is making sufficient profit on the product and both stops reordering.  This requires YOU to launch a new product as price erosion is almost always irreversible.  Avoid this scenario and consider partnering with one or two key distributors instead, using that exclusivity to negotiate better terms.  From iPods to Rolex to Estee Lauder, sustainable high-profit brands usually begin with controlled distribution.  Remember, more customers isn’t the goal; more profit is.

5.  Net-0… Create Demand vs. Offering Terms:  Focus on creating end-user demand so you can dictate terms.  Often one trade publication advertisement, bought at discount remnant rates, will be enough to provide this leverage.  Offering terms is the most consistent ingredient in startup failure, so cite startup economics and the ever-so-useful “company policy” as reasons for prepayment and apologize, but don’t make exceptions.  Net-30 becomes net-60, which quickly becomes net-120… and then you’re out of biz.  Time is the most expensive asset a startup has, and chasing delinquent accounts will prevent you from generating more sales. 

Remaining six to come tomorrow… STAY TUNED!

originally by Tim Ferris,  www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog

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