Operation bootstrap

You ever had a plan to be the biggest, best, number one product or service around?  Sure you have. We dream big and those dreams can and will come true(with preparation and a little opportunity luck)

Unfortunately, it takes money to make money.  It takes a lot of money to make a lot of money. ( or lose from gambling)   Keeping costs down is something we all aim to do and with lean marketing, it can happen.  If you are starting it at the grassroots, you're just trying to officially have customers.

I speak from experience.  Every advantage I've ever had was not always with a sales program or intelligence tool-It was my brain and resourceful thinking.  If you are a start up company, it's debatable if sales intelligence tools are worth the initial cost for you.  While they may give you great and valid insight, this comes at an expensive cost.  There are quite a few ways to find your target utilizing google and "bootstrap methods."  I found ways to find leadership and their contact information. Tips below..

Tip 1: Google is your friend

No Seriously..Google is your friend.  This is the most rudimentary tip but get stronger at searching on google.   There's a certain way to find executives that you want to pitch your service/product toward. Just googling their company and title, I was able to find those key people that make decisions.

Bootstrap Tip: I've found that when I type an executives name and "trade-show" or "PDF", I sometimes am able to find out out their direct phone number and email.  VP's of Sales and Marketing become easy to find because of their involvement with various events.

Tip 2: Take advantage of "Free trial" SI

Sales intelligence tools have amazing data to help you close deals and find your customers in a more efficient way.  While they can be an operational cost, the advantages of using the trials are:

• Seeing what's out there on the market.
• Getting several "free" accounts to conduct searching for leads.
• Identifying lead patterns to see consistency of each SI company.

Tip 3:  Contact the Sales department

In my professional career, I've gotten a few "nuggets" of information by contacting someone in sales. Sales people can be the biggest help to finding out who the VP of Sales and Marketing are.  They may not give you direct contact information, but are a good source for figuring out the chain of command.  Besides, if you have information they need,  you've entered into a networking relationship.

Tip 4:  LinkedIn 

LinkedIn is slowly becoming a favorite of mine.  LinkedIn offers "free" sales intelligence on key decision makers.  While their sales navigator is helpful and affordable, you can find quite a bit of information on connected contacts from just their LinkedIn profile.   Who knows, you may have a contact in common that can give you a warm introduction.

Tip 5: They tell two people..and so on..

Cold calling is not completely dead.  Decision makers receive so many emails lately that calling them is still a good way to reach them.  The issue you may not have their direct contact line.  By being sincere with what you can offer, people will at least give you an email or name that is the decision maker (Unless you are in IT security..whole nother ball game)

Make the most of your resources.  If any of you can think of other ways you "bootstrap" sales, I'd love to hear them.

Race to the best question to ask!

It's your 10:00 AM regular weekly meeting.  The person in charge of the meeting is providing insight and findings that would benefit everyone.  This isn't your normal status meeting where people inevitably get off track, or fall asleep- A special guest speaker is in the room. (Influential)

While they present, there's a serious race going on.  It's the race to ask the perfect question.

There's always 2 (sometimes 3) people in a meeting that are secretly battling for the title of "Best question asker" (incorrect grammar. I know.)  Sales meetings consist of various degrees of competition and when these 2 people battle for asking the best question, it's like a buffet line, you pick what works for you.

Person 1:  Asks an otherwise well thought out question.
Presenter: That's a great question!
Person 2 (feeling slighted) : Asks a question that's considered "deeper" than the previous question.
Person 1: Now feels the pressure, it's an official battle.  They start to use superfluous words to sound "better."

Has anyone ever experienced this before?

Hey! They know who you are already

I love reading content and what other people intelligently write.  By intelligently, I mean people that have some kind of story or expert opinion.  I believe they call it: Thought leadership.  Different brands have various methods to gaining viewership and listeners.  You can learn a lot from others on how they connect their brand to their target.

Let me tell you, I absolutely dislike name dropping in the beginning of a content post.  There was an article I read that was well written and very relevant to today and it gave me a sour taste in my mouth.  It began as:

"As the CEO of _____,  I attend seminars and collect business cards from leadership of all industries.."

To some, this won't bother them. To me, I became disengaged.  I understand the importance of having people know who you are and what your company does.  This is an information age where you can find where people live, work, and what they do for fun.  The issue is the lack of authenticity in helping customers with what they want or need.

If you are going to commit to a thought leadership piece, name dropping who you are is very much a sales message that can be ignored by prospects.  Your target can find out who you are after deciding if they want to even work with you.

Scratch that..your target knows who you are because they see your name and title in every content piece that's attached to your collateral.

So much to do...do nothing

As a professional balancing your work and personal life, there's certain priorities that we as people place on certain tasks. Going back to what you know is a comfort zone.  Even if it's no longer effective, you say to yourself, "it's the strategy that achieved company success." Sometimes we simply have so many problematic issues, that we do the easiest thing.

Nothing.

We do nothing.  We see the problem and we do nothing.

One of my favorite comedians, Jim Gaffigan always jokes about having to do so much that you simply take a nap.  There's a proverbial nap you take when you notice numerous challenges to overcome.  We all have set a "danger" level system that ultimately prevents us from being proactive to challenges.

Marketing- Deliverables are constantly set to deadlines.  Sometimes you compile data that gives you more work and it becomes a bigger challenge.  With facing the creative and analytical side of marketing, it's easy to blur what's important to do.  Still the decision to do nothing brings much worse consequences than being complacent.

Sales- You've noticed that each quarter the sales target is not going to be hit.  You also realize there's internal struggle within your sales management teams. You also forgot about the competitors that's consistently beating you every quarter and slowly taking customers from you.  There's so much to do, the easiest thing is to do nothing.

The best time to seek out help for so much work, is at the beginning of that work load.  Playing "catch up" is not fun and it forces you to always have to come from behind.  If you can anticipate issues and keep an open mind, you can stop a lot of the road blocks from hampering your success.

It's cold outside..All you need is a good book

Baby it's cold outside....

It's cold outside and the last thing I have wanted to do is go bar hopping in the snow and 20 degree temperatures.  I've always been a sporadic reader.  It's something I need to work on and I'm fully aware of it.  When it's cold outside, it brings the opportunity for me to read books in their entirety.  Most of my reading seems to happen from Jan-April.

Coincidence? I think not.

I've had the chance to read some useful books via the Amazon Kindle store.  There's some really great "free books" that offer excellent sales and marketing insight. While there are "award selling" books, I love to read from lesser known people on how they obtain their success.  Here's a book with highlights that makes it worth reading!

1. Booked: The digital marketing and social media appointment setting system.... By Josh Turner.

Premise: On amazon kindle you can read this book for free.  It's a valuable book that shows the landscape of today's prospecting world.  The only negative is for grammar police, the book is written in a very loose conversational tone.  If you are looking for a formal book, it's not for you.  If you approach sales like an entrepreneur, it's a good book to read.  Josh takes us through a bit of his history and how he leveraged social media to grow his business.  The biggest takeaway in his book is how he used LinkedIn groups to establish himself as a thought leader.  The plan results in him setting up easier appointments  and eliminating having to cold call.

Content marketing..forever changing

Bob Dylan had a song called "Times are a changing."

Also a phrase we constantly hear every year.  The times are certainly changing for content marketing and it's becoming more important than ever to be relevant and fresh.

You see content marketers have had to think like TV show producers because producing content is a demanding job that takes understanding your target and being original.  Content is more than just, "putting a meme together."  It's about anticipating what people may want to read about and guiding them along the way for their final decision.

Each piece of content has to have meaning and unfortunately, I see a lot of "irrelevant content."  Here are some signs you're content strategy should change.

"It takes you under one hour to produce content"

If it takes you less than an hour to create, edit, and post content, there's a good chance it's not as polished.  It's also probably not very focused and worth the time for your target.  Inbound thought leader Hub Spot, states it takes 1-2 hours to produce a 500 word blog post.  I tend to agree. Companies get wrapped up in gaining attention that they forget unpolished content can damage credibility.  

"Lack of original images, and visuals"

One of my personal weaknesses is I've never been a visual creator with images.  I barely can take pictures with a camera (sad I know)  I realize this weakness of mine and am in the process of finding someone to handle that side of my blog.  There's so much content being "plagiarized" that those who offer original images and visuals on their content will become more noticed and credible.  While there are "free image" websites, if everyone uses the same images, it's easy to become less noticeable. The company that invests in original visual resources, will see their content stand out from the pack. 

Disclaimer: If you are a company using "Meme's" always think about your target and how they will interpret that meme.  Meme's are funny but sometimes but have become a "cheaper" way to ramp up content efforts. 

"Constantly changing your voice"

Building an audience to view and read your content takes a lot of time.  It's not over night success so it's easy to "doubt" your ability to connect with viewers.  I've seen a lot of businesses change their voice that they begin to lose what embodies their brand.  This is a super thin line because you have to scrap what's simply not working but never lose your identity.  Your voice has to be consistent so you can focus on a niche of people rather than everybody.

Some of these pointers are obvious things I have looked to take as challenges to make my content better.  There's far too much mediocre content out there.  Let's be the solution-Not part of the problem.

Now Playing- "Times are a changing"

How valuable are sales meetings?

" I'm on my way to a meeting"
" I'm in meetings all day"
" I have a meeting"

We all have said this at several times in a week.  Sure, we all do actually have meetings, but are most of them productive?

My meetings normally consist of one meaningful productive one followed by several "meetings" to talk about future meetings.  The future meetings then discuss future meetings that talk about a problem we know about yet decide to make another meeting instead of solving that meeting. ( Sorry for the run-on sentences to all grammar police.)

The issue I have with continuous meetings is it's like a dance that never ends.  Eventually there's a point we both agree "I like you. Let's work."  

We also tell people we are in meetings as a crutch to avoid saying, "Not interested, don't bother me." 

Meeting has become like filler words( Ummm..like..ehhh...well) It's become a way to stall what we really want.  Customers get self conscious toward their ability to negotiate a deal that makes them the hero and salespeople desperately try to meet a "tracker" agenda. 

 If both sides let go of their insecurities, we'd all have some great and more productive meetings.