Category: Messages

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The Power of a Vision

VisionI heard it way back when from Steve Thornton at the 2012 Portland Success Summit. I’ve heard it from Zig Ziglar.  I’ve heard it from Anthony Robbins. I think I’ve heard it from every motivational speaker that I’ve ever had the privilege of listening to, starting 35 years ago with Louis Tice when I worked for the John Fluke Manufacturing Company.

(Quick aside:  With a name like Fluke, you had better deliver results that aren’t flukes, just like Smuckers needs to deliver good tasting jams and jellies!)

I’ve not only heard it and read about it in books including The Magic of Believing, and continued to use it, but I’ve actually taught it to others. And I am still amazed at the power of a vision.

If you can create a clear picture in your mind of how things are — will be, but in the present tense — when you are doing what you most want to do, your subconscious will cause you to resolve the conflict between the current picture of your reality and the reality as you imagine it. Your subconscious does not like conflict, or disharmony as I once heard it described. It wants you to feel content.

So if you create a vision of how you are when you have accomplished the goals you need to achieve your vision, and if you can couple that with a “feeling good” emotion, it will lead you to do the things necessary to change reality as it is today into reality as you visualize it. Or it will modify your picture of reality as you visualize to match where you are now and keep you stuck where you are. But it will resolve the conflict, one way or the other.

This is not new age weirdness. It is proven science that works for people in business, in athletics, in medicine and in any other field. And there are too many people who have used it, continue to use it, proselytize about it and, in fact succeed with it, to ignore.

If you haven’t been exposed to this powerful mechanism for changing your life, you owe it to yourself to learn as much as you can about it as soon as possible so that you can begin to use it to achieve your vision in life. Unless, of course, you are perfectly happy with the way things are in your life right now.

As I used to tell my students:  Make a picture, make it real and make it feel. Your creative subconscious will go to work for you to help you make your vision a reality.

Want more? Order your copy of Inspiration Now! today.

 

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Reflections on Being an Educator

Food in TaiwanThose of you who have read my many blog posts know that “once upon a time” I traveled the world teaching — and preaching — topics that I was passionate about. I did it because I believed in my causes. And because I made a pretty good living at it. And because I loved visiting new places.

Each one was a new learning experience about people and cultures even as I taught technical, management and marketing subjects. I still do that today, thankfully without nearly as much of the travel, and I still love to see companies grow as a result, at least in part, because of my work with them.

I remember by first trip to Taiwan. The Chung Shan Institute of Science and Technology had sent five people to Chicago, where I was doing a public seminar, to see whether or not I could do it for their people in Taipei. These people had traveled half way around the world, with multiple delays, to participate in the day’s events. It was a challenge to keep them awake with their jet lag during the seminar, which was technical in nature, but the after-hours meeting went well and they decided to spend the $10,000 it would take to bring me to their organization. So off to Taiwan I went.

I was met by a driver and an assistant upon arrival after passing through customers with seven carousels of 35mm slides and five boxes containing 50 binders containing 300+ page each. Thankfully I had created paperwork saying that it was all for demonstration purposes and not for import and had affixed my company’s corporate seal over my signature. Very official looking and quite acceptable to the customs people. Phew! Hurdle number one navigated after my travel half way around the world.

I was given a day to recover from jet lag and then joined the top managers of the Institute for a formal dinner in a top restaurant. And I waited a long time to see what the other people would eat before selecting my meal from the large spinning circular central table upon which the food was arrayed. And finally my host told me to please take some food so that everyone could begin to eat. No one, it turns out, would begin until I, the honored guest, approved each dish.

The food was exquisite. I have no idea what was in most of the dishes, but when in Taiwan, go with the flow! And speaking of flow, there was a lot of rice wine flowing, but it was not to be imbibed without a toast to the person on the left prior to raising a glass. To drink without the toast was clearly an insult. Something that was also explained to me after my first two sips.

OK, this is getting long. The point I was going to make when I started this post was that my hosts, who had paid me a lot of money, were treating me like royalty. During the two days of seminar presentation, they took me to a separate private room during breaks for coffee so that I could have a slight break. And they took me outside for lunch so that I was not required to answer questions during a meal break. In short, I truly felt more respected than I had every previously felt.

I asked my hosts about my treatment as they took me back to the airport after the seminar.  Why, I asked, had they treated me so well? And they were surprised at the question. They explained to me that educators, paid or not, were held in the highest esteem and should only be treated as such. And that they were honored that I would come to speak to their staff.

I think about this experience now and then as I teach people about marketing. I know that I gave 110% during my days in Taiwan because to do less would have been to dishonor my hosts. And that I will not do.

As you provide your product or service, I hope you will think of both your customers and your suppliers as honored partners. For they deserve no less than that.

Comments, pro and con, are welcome as always.  Thanks for reading.

 

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Your Prospect and Customer Information – Your Business Lifeline

 

Original Self Published Design for Testability BookOnce upon a time I wrote a book. It was actually my 2nd book but the first one I published on my own. I wrote it in a weekend on an IBM Selectric® typewriter. Yes, this was before computers so I guess I’m dating myself here. And the diagrams in the book were hand drawn using templates. Archaic, huh? But that’s what we had in those days.

I had discovered that increasing circuit complexity was driving test generation costs through the roof. And I knew the tricks needed to solve that problem. Thus the book. Everyone thought I was nuts trying to sell a 77-page book for $95 (in 1978 dollars!). But I had a hunch. So I spent $1,800 for an ad in Electronics Test magazine (see Media Selection for Your Target Markets for a related topic) and I sold enough books to put me into the teaching and preaching business for over a decade.

I decided, however, that I wanted to broaden the reach of my company by having the book published by a “legitimate” publisher and advertised and sold through that publisher’s distribution channels.

Design to Test Book - 2nd EditionThus came this version that sold for $39.95 to the “mass market,” such as it was at the time.  And Van Nostrand Reinhold did indeed sell more of these books than I did. Three times as many, as a matter of fact, in the first year. So everything was going great, right? Not so fast.

Take a look at the chart below to see what happened financially. While unit sales tripled, income from those sales dropped from an 80% gross margin to a 15% commission rate. That cut from $80 per book to $6 per book reduced revenues by $62,000 per year!

Some deal, huh? Now look at what happened to seminar revenues. They dropped by a factor of four — from more than $200,000 per year to less than $50,000 per year.

Revenue Comparison ChartSo what happened? Where was the disconnect in this strategy for broader distribution? It can be summed up in these two pictures:

Moral of the Story A Total Contact Disconnect

 

 

 

 

Strategies that look sound at first blush really need to be examined and vetted to make sure that they do not have hidden unintended consequences.

Have you ever had a similar experience? If you have it would be great if you’d be willing to share it.  Your comments are solicited and thanks for reading.

P.S.: You can view the whole presentation from which these slides were taken here.

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Version 1.0

Version 1.0 IllustrationI have to say that the number of comments I’ve received about my posts about the WOW customer experience has been gratifying. Some comments have related to the need to get things to market now and letting quality and functionality follow, which I find incredibly short-sighted in the majority of cases, while others have agreed with me about the need to get things right the first time if you want to avoid headaches in customer support down the road or the actual failure of your company due to bad product reviews.

The best comment, however, came from my good friend Peter van Geijn in Munich, Germany. His company sponsored my seminars and workshops in Germany in the 1980s and he recently reminded me of the story I used to tell about Version 1.0.  It goes something like this…

Did you know that the only people who never miss a development schedule milestone are software design engineers?  That’s right, software engineers. If today was the day they were supposed to deliver the product, today is the day that they will deliver it. It will be called Version 1.0.

It will be missing a lot of the originally specified functionality, of course, since there was no time to implement it all during the unrealistic management-dictated, all-too-short schedule, but it will be delivered today.  As Version 1.0.

It will also like contain a large number of “undocumented features,” known in the old days as “bugs,” that will have to be addressed in a future version release. But it will be delivered today. As Version 1.0.

Marketing and sales people hate Version 1.0 because it makes selling the product successfully more difficult and causes customers to complain to them — a lot. It also makes it difficult to get early testimonials and delays the purchase of large quantities of the product until the bugs are worked out.

Designers don’t mind. They keep cranking out new code and patches for the bugs. Sometimes it’s great job security and other times it isn’t. If it isn’t there’s always the next product for the next company to be developed.

Customer support managers love it for the job security reasons as well — subject to the risk of no job at all if the product can’t be fixed in time to save the company.

If the product was developed with OPM (other people’s money), top management will get rich in any case and move on to start another company where they can dictate another unreasonable schedule for a product that must do everything, cost nothing and be done yesterday. It is called Version 1.0.

I’d love to hear your experiences with products that fit this mold. Please share them and thanks for reading.

 

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Media Selection for Your Target Markets

Design to TestAre you a “spray and pray” marketer who tries to sell your product or service to anyone and everyone?  How is that working for you?

To be most effective you need to find people with problems that you can solve. It’s best if you are the only solution, fairly good if you are one of a few with a good reputation and not so good if you are one of many and have to compete on price.

Once upon a time, many years past, I marketed expensive automatic test equipment for the electronics companies of the world. Doing that gave me the opportunity to learn some important things. One of those things was that the design of the product to be tested had a lot to do with the time, effort and cost of generating an effective test program and with actually testing the product in a manufacturing environment. Another was that design engineers couldn’t care less about manufacturing test because that was someone else’s problem. They just had to get the functionality right on a very tight schedule. The third thing was that test engineers, who had to solve the problems that were “thrown over the wall” from development engineering to manufacturing test, were desperate for help.

Thus came the opportunity to write a book. It contained all of the techniques needed to make complex electronic designs much easier to test. The initial self-published hardcover version sold for $95 (in 1978 dollars) and it was advertised in Electronics Test magazine to the small portion of electronic engineers who worked in the manufacturing test environment.  Why not in Electronic Design magazine, with its much wider audience? Because the design engineers who read that magazine didn’t have the problem, even though they were the only ones who could implement the solutions to the downstream problems.

So while the book taught design techniques, it was sold to the test people who could then use it as a lever to convince engineering and top management that the topic was important enough to warrant a book being written about it. And one that contained the tools needed to make the economic justification for designing things to be testable as well as functional.

This is but one example of using the right media selection to get the message out to the people with a problem to solve. Much more cost effective than trying to sell to the “unwashed masses.”

Comments, please. And thanks for reading.

 

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Please Use Other Door

Doors

 

How do you feel when you are about to enter a place of business and are confronted by doors that are patently unfriendly to you, the door user?

The doors on the left in the illustration are a prime example of this. If you are the business owner, why pay for two doors when only one is usable? And why is it that you as the customer are always carrying something in the hand or arm that prevents you from using the other door?

And should you push to open the door or should you pull? If both sides have handles for pulling, you’d think you should pull, right? But how many times have you run into doors where that doesn’t work? I know I’ve met those unfriendly doors many times in my life.

How complicated would it be to put a push plate on the side of the door that needs pushing to open it and a pull handle on the side that needs pulling? Or make the doors pull both ways? Or push both ways?  Is this rocket science?

What has the design of doors have to do with marketing?  A whole bunch, it turns out. You want people to be in a friendly, pleasant and receptive mood when they enter your place of business, don’t you? Of course you do. So why make them angry and frustrated with a poorly designed entrance to your store before they even get inside? Isn’t that completely counterproductive to what you are trying to accomplish?  Of course it is. So don’t do it!

If you are not a brick and mortar enterprise, is your website design and implementation just as guilty of frustrating your prospective customers as the physical doors illustrated in this post? You might want to take a second look, or have someone unfamiliar with it take a look for you. You could end up really surprised — pleasantly or unpleasantly! What about your business pages on your social media sites of choice?  Are they easy or hard to get to and/or navigate within or around? Is there some semblance of logic to the navigation paths?

Everything your business does needs to be considered in light of your marketing objectives. Don’t make yourself difficult to do business with. Because people will go elsewhere if they can’t get through your door.

Comments welcome, as always.  Thanks for reading.

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Italian Goulash

Italian GoulashIn a significant departure from what I usually post, today I am going to give you a recipe and cooking instructions for a meal that I invented from necessity in New Jersey many years ago, transported to the Bay Area and actually had a good friend from Rome, Italy, prepare when he and his wife got home. I still have the certificate from them stating that this dish, which doesn’t resemble goulash in any way, was actually prepared and very well received in Italy.

It takes some effort and a fair amount of time to make this dish, which should serve four people, but the result is nothing short of amazing.  I guarantee it and many people, including my boys and anyone else who has partaken of it, will attest to that.

Ingredients:

  • 16 oz Oscar Meyer center cut bacon
  • 16 oz Ore-Ida Fast Food French fries
  • 1 or 2 green pepper
  • 1 or 2 sweet onion
  • 8 fresh eggs
  • 2 cups grated cheddar cheese

In a large skillet:

  • Cut bacon into ½” pieces. Fry until golden brown. Remove from pan and drain on paper towel. Reserve bacon grease.
  • Cut potatoes into ½” pieces. Fry until crispy and golden brown in bacon grease. Remove from pan and drain on paper towel. Reserve remaining bacon grease.
  • Dice pepper and onion and fry in remaining bacon grease until slightly soft.
  • Add bacon bits and potatoes back into pan with medium heat. Mix thoroughly.
  • Scramble eggs and pour into pan. Stir until bacon, potatoes, peppers and onions are well coated and until eggs are almost done.
  • Add and stir in grated cheese until melted, removing pan from heat to prevent anything from burning.

Serve immediately with salt and pepper to taste and toasted sourdough bread.

You might wonder what this recipe has to do with marketing, and that’s OK. Please make this dish and comment on this post, or use the website contact form, to provide me with your opinion about it. I will then reveal the secret connection.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.  Mangia!

 

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Some Further Thoughts on Creating the Customer WOW! Experience

A few weeks ago, on July 26th to be exact, I posted a written rant about how a meeting I’d just been to was concerned not with creating an initial WOW experience for customers but instead with damage control and reputation repair.

As some colleagues and I prepare to launch a new product and set of services, we have frankly been tempted more than once to “jump the gun” and start looking for fans, connections and clients before we’re really ready. Especially since there are some upcoming large networking events where we think we could get a lot of leverage and create a lot of buzz. Think the equivalent of trade show deadline for new product introduction.

We have, and I believe properly so, decided not to jump the gun on this as you’ll hear in the video embedded in this post. Even though we know we’re going to miss more than a couple of great opportunities to promote the new stuff, we think that having the infrastructure in place to create a real WOW! experience when we do introduce is worth any small loss of prospects in the short term.

Think about it.  It takes a long time to build a great reputation. It takes a very short time to ruin one. I heard again very recently that it takes only one “dumb s**t” to wipe out ten “atta boys” and I believe it.  So we’re going to take the time needed to get it right.  Website, social media, collaterial materials, markets, messages and media combinations. Tough as it is to wait, it is the right thing to do.

After all, do we really want to send the message to our potential new markets that we don’t have the patience and professionalism to do the kind of job for ourselves that we will be promising to do for them? I don’t think so. What do you think?

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Some Results I’m Proud to Share

Today marked the first presentation of The Marketing Seminar/Workshop that I’ve been developing over the last couple of months.  We had a small but diverse group — from telecom to radio to on-line learning to association management to interior design to multi-level marketing to web-based business-to-business and business-to-consumer networking to solar energy and more — and the session was, frankly, a smashing success.

You can see how the participants rated the session’s overall quality, the content, the speaker — me — and the materials, and what some of the participants who made comments on the evaluation forms had to say. I have to say that I’m pretty proud of these ratings and comments. And I extend my sincere thanks to all of the participants. They were great.

Today’s session was priced very inexpensively — $45 early bird/ $55 regular — so that there would be enough people to get a real feel for the successful development of the content and the materials.  The next public session, which I’m planning for sometime in October, will be about twice today’s price.  Why?  Because it is worth it. And because I can’t make a living giving my expertise away at too low a cost.

Will the next session be worth that increased cost to you? I think if you look at the infographic embedded in this post you’ll agree that it is.  If not, write to me and tell me so. I’d love to hear from you.

p.s.: If you don’t want to wait until the Fall to get the benefit of participating in this session, I do offer in-company versions. :-)

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Seven Steps to Success

Marketing-Strategy-Development-Process-FlowOK, the drawing is a little hard to read on this post. You can find the full sized version on my Pinterest business board, but I really want to talk about the steps in the process and not the pretty picture itself.

The drawing shows the seven steps in the process that I recommend when it comes to developing a marketing plan and the strategies and tactics that make up its details.

It makes the assumption — and watch out here, because assumptions can be dangerous! — that the items in the funnel are fixed. If they are not, then you’re actually in better shape than if they were. If you can play with the product, the packaging and the pricing, the promotion part may become much easier as you look at your markets, messages and media.

External data on markets, messages and media alternatives needs to be gathered and analyzed within the constraints of the business such as budgets, product and goals. The validity of the decisions made during the preliminary and subsequent decision-making processes is directly proportional to the validity of the input data.

Do not skimp on this step. Doing so means putting the results in jeopardy and potentially wasting a lot of energy, time and money with do-overs or faulty implementations.

Marketing strategies and tactics have changed with changes in technology, the economy, buyer demographics and behavior and message delivery mechanisms such as social media. But the basics still apply. You need to develop and deliver clear concise messages that will resonate with your prospects and customers so that they respond positively to your calls for action.

When the initial analysis is complete, it’s time to discuss the preliminary results. Challenge each assumption. Validate every data source. Take advantage of the expertise of everyone who can contribute to the development of a successful strategy or who may be impacted by or charged with implementing the tactics resulting from the final strategy.

  • Then IMPLEMENT the agreed-upon strategy in the biggest, best and most complete way possible. DO NOT hold back or hesitate. If you believe in what you have developed, go for it!
  • MEASURE the results of implementing your strategy and the effectiveness of each tactic.  Because if you can’t measure you can’t improve.
  • Use CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT methods to fine-tune your strategy over time, discarding things that don’t work and emphasizing those that do.

You will get out of a formal marketing strategy development or review/improvement effort a set of benefits commensurate with the amount of time, effort and expertise put into the strategy development process.

This post was excerpted from my Marketing Strategy Development e-Book.  If you’d like a copy, please request one here and I’ll be happy to send you one. And I’d love to have your comments on the process recommended above.  Don’t be shy!