Marketing Lesson Learned from Kona

Just like your clients, Kona is a creature of habit. (As a refresher, Kona is my 10 month old Golden Retriever.) Every morning she hears the alarm go off she knows it time for her morning walk. And just like most mornings, we take the same route around the neighborhood. And for the most part, Kona is just fine with that.

Does this sound like your clients or patients? Are they stuck in the same routine with you? Do they place the same order every time? Do they get the same treatment every time? Are you boring your clients with the same routine?

If Kona could talk, I know she would ask, “What’s new?” Isn’t that what everybody asks when you see them? I’ve never once ran into an old friend or acquaintance and had them ask, “so, what’s old?” That just doesn’t happen.

However, every once in a while we go on a walk in the afternoon, or in the evening, or take a different route. And what happens? Kona gets excited! Her tail starts to wag, her nose goes into overdrive as she smells all the new smells (she is a retriever afterall). The change energizes her and gives her a boost.

So here’s this months lesson. You need to be constantly telling your clients “What’s New!” If you’re not constantly and consistantly telling them, “What’s New,” or “What’s Different,” or “What’s Next,” they’ll go find someone who will, and its more than likely your competitor.

No BS Time Management

Eliminate the time between the idea and the act and your dreams will become realities.
- Dr. Edward L. Kramer

Entreprenuership is the conversion of your knowledge, talents, guts, and time into money. Time is valuable, although the value differs from person to person. When most people place value on their time, they do so based on an eight-hour work day, which is not all that correct. It’s hard to get eight productive hours out of each day.

One study involving Fortune 500 CEO’s revealed that they achieved 28 productive minutes a day.

If you are your own boss, you decide how much you are going to get paid because you write your own paycheck. Most of the time that salary is determined by whatever is left over at the end of the month. This is a mistake because:

1. It indicates zero planning
2. You pay yourself last; a common reason why most entrepreneurs end up going broke.

Planning

To plan against business failure and going broke, you need to decide how much money you’re going to take out each year to cover your salary, perks, contributions, retirement plans, etc. Eighty percent of entrepreneurs can’t come up with this number.

To do this, you need to have a base earnings target, otherwise you can’t calculate what your time is worth and will not be able to make good decisions about how you invest that time. As a result, you have no control over your business or life.

Calculate Your Base Earnings Target

Coming up with a number will dramatically affect the decisions you make, habits you cultivate, and people you associate with. Here’s how?

• Divide the number of workday hours
• Multiply it to allow for unproductive versus productive hours

A closer look:

Base Earnings Target _______________

Divide work hours in a year
(244 days x 8 = 1,952 in a year) _______________
= Base hourly number $_______________

x Productivity-versus
Non-Productivity Multiple x_______________

= What Your Time
Must Be Worth Per Hour $_______________


It’s important that you surround yourself with people who understand and respect the value of your time. If you don’t eliminate the people who don’t respect the value of your time from your business life, then you ad your business will pay the price. You also need to delegate tasks to other people that tend to take away from your valuable time.

3 True Life Stories

Here are the 3 quick true stories I told you about last week. They may give you a bit of insight.

Story #1: Years ago, I was working a booth at a business show, showing off my books and tapes. About 500 people came through that booth over two days. About 400 took catalogs furtively and scurried off hastily, lest I grab them and sell them something. About 99 made small purchases. One guy handed over his credit card and said, “Ship me one of everything you’ve got.” I didn’t know him from Adam’s housecat.

But a few weeks later, I was watching a national TV program, and there he was being interviewed. Seems he was one of the most successful chiropractors in America, retiring from having built 3 $1 million a year practices, one right after the other, and now was head of a consulting firm with 600 clients each paying about $3,000 a month for his advice. That’s $1.8 million a month for those of you short on fingers and toes.

Story #2: Many years ago, a kid (too young to drive) walked a few miles from his house to a riding stable and pestered the owner for a job, and got hired to clean saddles and scrub buckets and mostly do the real grubby stuff nobody else wanted to do after school for $20 a week. The kids used the $20 to buy a used set of Earl Nightingale self-improvement tapes. The kid was Dan Kennedy.

Story #3: A guy at a garage sale found a set of my tapes (at the time) and bought them for $5.00. The fellow selling them told the buyer he guessed they were all right, but they hadn’t done anything for him. In fact, he’d just shut down his business, was selling off all his stuff, and moving to another city to take a job at a relative’s company.

He said, “The free enterprise system just didn’t work for little guys anymore.” He said, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and that’s all there is to it. The guy that bought my tapes for $5.00 listened to them, used them, worked with them, and started his own business. When he wrote to me two years later to tell me of making over $200,000 that year in his business, he said, “Funny thing. I was concerned about it at the time, but now I understand – you see, the business I started is exactly the same kind of business that guy I bought your tapes from got out of.”

Now let me finish this long-winded, gas-baggy diatribe with one psychic prediction: some people reading this will say to themselves, “Does Travis think I fell off a turnip truck yesterday? Heck, I can see through this as clear as day. This is just a clever ploy to separate me from my coins the next time he gets around me or mails me some literature. I’m not going to fall for it, no sir. I’m keeping my coins.” Some other folks will get it. It’s all kind of fun to watch.

"Rich people have big libraries, poor people have big TVs."

I recently purchased a brand new, very nice book case for my home office. That’s because the other walls of bookshelves are all full of books, but I want to buy more ‘because I’m always looking’ for the next good idea.

A great speaker I've head several times, Jim Rohn, says he’s never visited a wealthy person’s home that didn’t have a big library, and that ought to tell you something. He didn’t say it, but I sure have visited a lot of poor people’s homes where you couldn’t find a book at all. Of course, it’s easy to invest in education now; I’ve got the money to justify it. But you see, I behaved this way when I was younger and had much less money coming in. That’s why I didn’t stay that way. To once more quote Jim, he says, “Miss a meal if you must, but don’t miss a book.”

So when I’m out speaking, and I start giving a little commercial about my educational materials, these days I kind of smile and chuckle to myself about how very predictable folks are. Many think, “Uh-oh, he’s about to try and sell me something and take my money, so I’ll close my ears or duck out the back and save my coins.

Others think, “Oh, by, he’s about to offer me something I can get to multiply my coins. Bring it on, man, bring it on.”

Then I think, “Terrific – that wonderful self-selecting process, the cutting of the herd. The dumb ones who are just trying to hang on and keep the few coins they’ve got, will go away. The smart ones, who are committed to multiplying their pennies and who I’ll enjoy having a relationship with, they’ll become my customers. Couldn’t work out better if I’d designed human behavior myself.

I'll finish off this 'soap box' moment in a couple days with 3 stories that really illustrate how this works out in the real world.

www.3DMailResults.com

Your Beharior Matters

Last week I left you with a story about shiny Mercedes and old, dusty Chevy's and how their behavior was different I was that was.

Its simply really, because their behavior reflected their attitudes, and their attitudes controlled their lifestyles, as well as their practice’s level of success or lack thereof.

You see, the successful person loves being sold and tries to learn something from that by itself; then he loves to buy, because his experience has been and always is that every time he invests in education, he finds at least one good idea, acts on it, and recoups his investment plus more.

The unsuccessful person hates being sold, buys reluctantly, because his experience has been and is that every time he invests in education, he gets nothing out of it and has fewer coins in his pocket afterwards.

How can two people in the exact same business in the exact same town experience such dramatically different results? Clue: the education being sold and bought is the same, so it’s not the causative factor. Clue: in this picture, there is only one difference.

Very early, when I was starting out doing what I do, I got some very, very good advice from a friend of mine, with considerable experience selling how-to “stuff” to sales managers and sales professionals. He told me, “If you want to make money at this, ignore the people who obviously need your information the most and focus on selling to individuals who are already quite successful but eager to do even better.”

Here’s what I found out: winners live what’s called THE PRINCIPLE OF THE SLIGHT EDGE; they know that teeny adjustments and refinements yield disproportionately big improvements, so they are always hunting for even one idea that can tweak what they’re doing a smidgen to the good. They’re looking hard, every day, for some information to invest in that might give them a slight edge.

Not only don’t they mind being sold, they’re eager to buy. Losers stay losers for three basic reasons:

1. They do not learn from information.
2. They do not act on ideas; so
3. They don’t want more information.

I have a couple more thoughts on this subject, but I'll save those for next time. Until then, keep on marketing!

How To Keep Yourself And Your Hard-Earned Money Safe From Us Smooth-Talkin’ Salesmen, Selling “Success Stuff”

This is not an article about selling carpet cleaning. This is an article about the often unnoticed truth about what separates the winners from the Mediocre Majority in business, in any business, and in life.

I’ve been at “this” a long time; via speaking, giving seminars, and otherwise trying to inform, inspire and ignite people into action on principles, strategies, ideas and behaviors likely to lead to success in business and in life in general. And I long ago stopped trying to figure out why some people alertly and eagerly grab opportunities and ideas while others are asleep at the switch.

But I can tell you a few things I’ve learned about “reading people.” For example, in a seminar setting, the ones who are first up to invest in something designed to help them be more successful are usually the people in the group who need help the least. The ones who sit, arms folded, cynical, mumbling “heard that before” and grumbling about being sold to, are the ones who need help the most.

Over the years I have held several seminars. When I met them before the start of the seminar, I used to ask for their present gross and their goal. Virtually without exception, the first few people to rush back to buy the business-building materials already had the highest grosses in the room – and they took their armload of goodies out to Mercedes, Cadillacs, Lincolns and the like to drive home. The last few to ever-so-slowly wobble back to buy had lower grosses, except for the few who didn’t buy at all – they had the lowest grosses of all, and drove home in old Chevys.

Why was this?? Well, you'll have to wait for my next post in a few days.

www.3dmailresults.com

Life and Limb

Going back to the person who invests life and limb in creating her course on parenting. If she’s given any thought to parenting at all, she has statistics. She’ll say, “There are x-# parents of kids between a and b.”

Great. Unfortunately, an overwhelmingly majority of those parents don’t give a rat’s behind about being better parents. Some think they know it all. Some think their kids are screwed up, but they’re okay. Most don’t think at all. Some are dead broke. Some are functionally illiterate. And I could go on.
Somewhere in all that, there is a miniscule percentage who are literate, open-minded, concerned, self-improvement oriented, and have already demonstrated their willingness to invest time and money in being better parents. But if you have to wade through all the muck to find them, you will run out of gas long before you get there.

“But there are millions who NEED my product.” Terrific. Want to get me excited? Show me how many have previously, preferably repetitively, demonstrated their ability and willingness to invest in their desire for products or services like yours. Then, show me that we can find them and reach them. Now, we got something. Now I can help you.