Category Archives: Creativity

Opportunities

One day an opportunity will arise for you the salesman to say I’m sorry. I was wrong. It was my fault. My product or service did not work the way it was intended to.

Everyday an opportunity will arise for you to serve.

Most days an opportunity will arise for you to not ignore the call.

Probably everyday an opportunity will arise for you to make the call you don’t want to.

When we don’t take the opportunity alloted, we miss a musical opportunity.

Noise is what the market expects (you’re not going to serve well, you’re not going to say you were wrong, you’re going to ignore the difficult call, and you’re not going to make the follow-up call). Noise is par. Noise is average. Noise is vanilla.

I’m giving you 2 permissions:

1) You are allowed to ignore the small voice inside your head that wants you to play the blame game, not serve, ignore the call, or not make the call. The more we give in to this voice, the more shallow life becomes.

2) Talk to your fears. Call them out. Address them. Demand they weaken. They’re responsible for most of where we’re lacking music in our lives.

Now that you have this permission, what are you waiting on?

Our days are full of endless opportunities, and it is the result of these opportunities that will cause your brand continue living in an economy where there are brand causalities happening all around us.

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A Success Formula

Pause.

Look deep into the mirror, a sunset, and/or your soul and find out who you are.

Again, this takes pause – and we’re not so hot at pausing in world in that operates in fast forward.

Once you’ve got who you are figured out then go serve somebody.

Knowing who you are will have 99% to do with what success looks like for yourself.

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Sales Meeting 2.0

Pardon the last post. It published on its own.

Good morning again.

We are all in sales. The lawyer, the dentist, the banker, the Realtor, the doctor, the pastor, the mom, the dad, the artist, the mechanic, the poet, the musician, the coach – all of us.

You don’t just have to have a product, thing, or widget to sell. You can sell you, your service, your thoughts, your ideas, and even your brand.

Three things lead to successful sales careers.

1) Contacts

-Do you have enough contacts/people/potential customers? Remember 99 no’s typically equals 1 yes. Put another way, you may need a database of 1000 contacts for 10 deals.

2) Appointments

– This could now also involve web/social interactions and conversations. Who’s on the books for today? Tomorrow? July? Spring 2013? Question – are in you on the conversation? If you are not busy today, something went wrong yesterday (go back, dig in, replay – watch film on yourself).

3) Sales/Contracts/Closings/etc.

-AKA payday.

If you’re light in the #2 category, you’ve got a #1 problem. If you’re light in the #3 category, you’ve got #1 and #2 problem.

If you’ve got a #1 problem, you may be the problem.

Happy monday. #LTMP

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Music Contingencies

Your music is contingent on two things: your experiences and your response to those experiences.

Experience is going to happen and we don’t have much control there. It’s happening right now – every millisecond.

Response, on the other hand, is all up to us.

No matter your current state, some of the greatest music ever was written in the artist’s most clueless times. So in the midst of your confusion, bend your ears and peel your eyes.

Your music will happen when your experience collides with opportunity for you to respond.

Fear and resistance will plead with you to not respond. Deny them all their rights and #LTMP.

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Gibberish

In the midst of your product, service, or brand transaction careful with your choice of words. Even though, you know the lingo and how it works – the customer may not.

For instance…

Today, the Realtor should have only one song streaming in his car while his clients are riding with him…INTEREST RATES WILL NEVER BE THIS LOW AGAIN. He should play that song over and over and over. And he should not just say they are 3.75% fixed over 30 years – that doesn’t mean much to most people. He should paint the picture of what rates were just a few years ago, and show the difference in monthly payments and interest saved. Like the blog at I’m A Happy Buyer.

The financial advisor should probably stay away from his opinion of the “T-Bill” and simply advise us with historical charts of different fund performance, potential dividend performance, and tax benefits when we hand him our dollar. GDP is not on our radar when we’re talking about retirement and college tuition.

The car salesman, for most people, should abandon words like torque, hemi, and maybe even MPG. Just show us what THIS car will cost compared THAT car to fill up once gas hit $5.00 gallon. We’ll make the call from there.

Or what about beer? At the ball park the only word associated with the brew that the consumer is concerned with is cold. This is not the time to discuss born on dates, filtering, and calories. Not the case at an upper end micro-brewery in Boston. The consumer there is very beechwood and hops conscious, so it’s ok to go there with him.

The higher price of poker becomes in the transaction the more basic the vocabulary should be. The fancier your words, the more we feel we’re being sold not served. Simple wins in sales, so be careful with your gibberish.

Put another way – We’re not impressed when you know a lot…we’re impressed when we walk away knowing a lot more than when we came to you.

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