The Agile Scaleup

Mind Control; 10 Questions; Complimentary Book; Cancer Killer

"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

5 Techniques to Win Over the Masses -- Dr. William Horton, author of Mind Control, keynoted the "Taipan: Making of Asian Giants" program this week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. After showing various debate clips featuring Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama, he outlined five techniques for winning over (manipulating!) the masses:

1. Encourage their dreams

2. Justify their failures

3. Allay their fears

4. Confirm their suspicions

5. Create a common enemy

So this is how it's done -- cold and calculating. We're so predictable. Keep this list handy.

Increase Revenue 10 Fold -- John Assaraf, author of The Answer, challenged all of us at the Sales & Marketing Summit to raise the bar considerably. Energy is everything and our thoughts control the vibration of the energy we attract to us. So he reminded us that whatever we're achieving (or not achieving) is exactly what we've been expecting. This especially goes for sales people. You can teach all the sales techniques you want, but if the mind doesn't believe, it really won't be achieved. John has 10 questions to determine if you have what it takes to be super successful. I particularly like number 1 on the list.

Twitter Generates $200k in Revenue -- Mike Jagger, CEO of Provident Security and a new venture called JustTheBill.com, landed $200k in revenue using Twitter. At the Sales Summit he presented an entertaining and insightful 15 minute presentation on how he uses Twitter in business. One quick tip: go to www.search.twitter.com and search for your name and/or company name -- see who might be twittering about you. Then grab the RSS feed of your search so you're monitoring Twitter constantly. See what people might be saying about you and your firm.

Successful Selling: Free Book Offer -- Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing led our audience through a series of insightful exercises at the Summit. He's the author of Successful Selling which provides techniques for attracting more prospects, increasing referrals and repeat business, and focusing on customers who what to buy. He made his book available for free to every Summit attendee and has extended the offer to all of our newsletter readers. Email Matt your mailing address to [email protected] to get your free copy.

Hiring a Sales Manager -- and this note from Joseph E. LaValla, CEO of Integrity Graphics on his use of Objective Management Group's (OMG) sales force and sales manager assessment tools. After realizing the sales assessment tools he had been using for 15 years weren't the quality he thought, he made what he feels is his best hire in 25 years using OMGs assessments:

"As the worst recession of our time was starting to settle in, I was trying to stay ahead of the curve, felt I could use a little help with my sales team and asked Objective Management Group for their expertise.

The first step was to assess the sales force for sales capability and potential. I have been using personal assessments for over 15 years and had assessments on each of them. I thought and believed that I was getting a quality assessment from another firm until I saw how focused, detailed, and customized towards my requirements the Objective Management Group assessment is.

Once the sales force evaluation was completed and the training began we knew success was imminent as we knew that the salespeople that were to be trained had the personal tools, incentive and ability to succeed. As business from existing clients dropped in 2009, we increased our new business sales to record levels. Additionally, when it was time to hire a new Sales Manager I took their advice and followed the Objective Management Group's proprietary sales recruiting process. I set the requirements and they provided the assessments and with great success I would say. I processed over 200 applications in less than 30 days and feel that my new Sales Manager could be one of my best hires in over 25 years of hiring."

Vitamin C Kills Malignant Mesothelioma Cells -- research evidence continues to build a case supporting the simple power of high dose Vitamin C to kill cancer cells while leaving healthy cells strengthened. I received another 50 gram Vitamin C IV just before the Sales Summit -- something I do for prevention (plus it reduces wrinkles naturally -- no Botox required).

Biggest Sales Mistake; 40% No Decisions; 5 Rules for Readability; Easy Videos

"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

WARNING: below are some "aha" nuggets from the Fortune Sales & Marketing Summit, however, please don't construe these as a complete summary, as in "is that all they learned?" Space limits me to a few simple, yet hopefully, useful ideas.

Biggest Sales & Marketing Mistake -- in proposals, on websites, in emails, during conversations -- the biggest mistake is talking too much about your own company -- your history, your products/services, features, benefits, people, and capabilities. See if you are doing this. More on this below.

Inexpensive Corporate Videos -- According to Forrester Research, video is 53 times more likely to be on the 1st page of Google. Bettina Hein, founder of Pixability, used a simple Flip camera to produce a 2 minute summary video of the Fortune Sales & Marketing Summit this week in Vegas (a few key nuggets shared -- and check out our stage). She then showed everyone at the Summit how to do something similar, info you can find on her website. And for $595 (a fraction of the cost of a professionally produced video) she'll take your video clips and produce, overnight, something nice.

40% No-Decision -- this metric has been on a steady increase, notes Jeff Thull, author of Mastering the Complex Sale. "It indicates that your biggest competitor is not another firm, but customers deciding they don't want to purchase a solution like yours from anyone. They just don't see the value in what you do." This is why 50% of the selling process must be spent establishing the value of your solution through a Diagnostic and Discovery process. Most sales people don't want to take the time. But if they do take the time, it reduces the overall time to close a sale by 42%. Read Jeff's book.

Always Be Leaving -- Thull (pronounced 'tool') shared several what he called "Key Thoughts." One key thought is for sales people to "always be leaving" a conversation with a customer. For instance, the customer says "but your competition has a better solution for a lower price." Rather than confront and defend, it's better to say "the competition just might have a better solution and price. I just don't know enough yet about your situation to know if that's the case." You never want to be verbally confrontational in a sale.

Top Four Blog/White Paper Titles -- spend 40% of your time picking the right titles for your blog posts, videos, or the white papers you publish on the web. Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot and author of Inbound Marketing, had us construct four impactful titles. Keys: 10 words or less so Google doesn't truncate; always include the key words your customers use to search for your products and services; and make it catchy like the headlines of a newspaper or CNN.com. For example, one of his employees is an Olympic athlete, so rather than title a white paper "Growing your business" she might title it "An Olympic Athlete's 8 Internet Marketing Tips" -- internet marketing tips being the three key words and Olympic Athlete being the catch.

Five Rules for Readability -- Tom Sant, author of Persuasive Business Proposals, shared five rules for making anything you write more readable -- and Microsoft Word can automatically tell you if you've met four of the rules: short sentences (ave. 17 words or less); short words (average 5 characters or less); 10th grade reading level or lower; and less than 10% passive voice. I've been writing for years and never knew about the "Readability Statistics" tool in Word. The fifth rule is no fluff, guff, geek, or weasel words in your writing.

Readability Statistics -- Press F1 while in Word to pull up the Help/Search menu and search for Readability Statistics. Follow the instructions to turn on the feature. The only confusing part of the instructions is the "Word Options" choice is at the bottom of the right hand column of the main Word pull down menu. Once the feature is activated, you have to actually manually check the Spelling and Grammar of your document once (under the Review menu) and at the end of the process the summary pops up. Cool feature -- I'm at a 9.7th grade reading level, 4.7 characters per word, 20 words per sentence, and 2% passive voice for this insight. I was higher on all these statistics and made adjustments.

Biggest Mistake in Losing Proposals -- talking about your company! Most winning proposals don't mention the name of your own company until the 2nd or 3rd page of an Executive Summary. The first page should outline the customers pain/situation and the measurable results they'll achieve if they purchase your solution. Same goes for your website, emails, and initial conversations with potential customers. Read Tom's book.

More Nuggets Next Week...and FYI, next year's Fortune Sales & Marketing Summit is April 19 -- 20, 2011 -- likely on the east coast of the U.S. It's "not knowing what you don't know" -- unconscious incompetence, as John Assaraf, author of The Answer, called it -- that is the biggest risk to your business.

F500 Quadrupled Profits; Many Firsts; Biggest Winners; Meeting Room Name Update

"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

Profits Quadrupled for Fortune 500 -- the latest list was released today with Wal-Mart ($408 billion) back on top, followed by Exxon Mobile, Chevron, GE, and Bank of America. And the big news -- corporate net profits jumped from an average of 1% in 2008 to 4% in 2009, near the historical average of 4.7%. Take five minutes and read this excellent Fortune article summary of the sector-by-sector results -- and some excellent "how to" examples of success like Mattel's.

Many Firsts for the F500 List -- 1) Shed 821,000 jobs (3.2% of payroll), the biggest loss in the list's 56 year history; 2) Sales fell 8.7%, the biggest fall since 1983; 3) Profits jumped 335%, from $90 billion to $391 billion, the second largest jump in history; and 4) GM fell from the top 10, the first time in the list's history (and Ford made the top 10 -- no bailout required!).

Biggest Winners On the List....(and saddest news from my viewpoint) were the pharmaceutical companies according to the article. And the latest health care reform further subsidizes the industry with tens of billions of additional dollars -- which is why the industry spent $100 million in lobbying and advertising to support the reform this time around. My family was able to help my 75 year old mother get off the bag of drugs her doctors had loaded her up with (twice!) and for which they likely received kick-backs, while many US citizens are drowning and suffering a decreased quality of life from all the legal meds doctors are prescribing (OK, that's off my chest).

Lean and Best -- getting "lean" early is how the Fortune 500 drove increased profits from decreased revenues. And getting LEAN (the formal process) doesn't mean simply piling more work onto fewer employees. Nurse Next Door, the poster-child for a growth service company implementing formal LEAN practices (doubled call center productivity, dramatically reduced time to sign-up new franchisees, took the pressure off their payroll staff, etc), was just named one of the 75 Best Employers in Canada, being named alongside companies such as Google Canada and the Four Seasons Hotels. Congrats to Ken Sim, John Hart, and their team. For those wanting to learn how to achieve similar results -- more with less and maintain happy employees -- contact Guy Parsons at LeanVS -- he can help.

Top 20 Most Innovative -- besides also being named British Columbia's #1 company to work at in 2009, Nurse Next Door, along with Gazelles 200 participating firms Coastal Contacts and BuildDirect, we're recognized as the Canadian province's 20 most innovative companies. Noted co-founder Ken Sim "the one correction I would make to the article (about the Innovative 20) is we have NOT adopted "Six Sigma". We have adopted and championed "Lean". We are actually recognized as a "lean" leader in the health care and services industries." Lean matters -- and is so much easier to implement than Six Sigma!

Coaches Matter (Roddick and Mickelson) -- I think sports analogies in business are way overused, however, a Reuters article in Gulf News last week (Middle East's leading English newspaper) caught my attention. It noted that Andy Roddick's new coach, Larry Stefanki, "who guided Chilean Marcelo Rios and Russian Yevgeny Kafelnikov to world number one ranking, has been working with Roddick over the past year" thinks Roddick could emulate Andre Agassi who won five of his eight Grand Slam titles after age 29. Roddick has won two of his last three tennis tournaments and has Stefanki to credit. In turn, Mickelson's Masters win this past weekend put a smile on my face, noting that his coach Butch Harmon is Tiger's old coach. Coaches matter!!

Meeting Room Naming Update -- many options flooded in since my request last Thursday:

• PrintingForLess.com-- name theirs after Montana's famous local mountains: Absaroka, Electric Peak, Grand Teton, and Moonlight

• Skoda Minotti-- name theirs after universities and colleges from which their team are alumni i.e. The Ohio State University conference room, University of Notre Dame conference room, etc.

• HPTI-- Innovation Room.

• WisdomTransfer-- Mission Control (nice double meaning)

• Genesis World Mission-- OpRoom (for Opportunity Room and double play on Operations Room)

My Personal Favorite Name -- and this note from Kirk Zehnder, President/CEO of Earnest "Being a Cleveland company we named our five meeting rooms after famous business people in Cleveland. The War room got the best name of them all, "Rockefeller" and yes the homage to (your) book was extra credit." BTW Kirk's letter to his customers posted on the homepage of the website shows he's listening to them -- take a moment to read.

Father's Legacy: A War Room Story -- and finally, this moving story from Matt Schwartz, President of Schwartz Employee Benefits "As for the 'war room' when my father passed away unexpected three years ago, we opted to honor him by converting his office into our "internal meeting space," using his desk as the conference table. He had joked for many years that he dreamed about a distinguished photo on the wall, with a pin light shining up, with the title "Founder." As it turns out, a few months before his death we had professional photos taken so he really does now beam down, presiding over our exec and other sessions. It's an ongoing reminder of our core value 'Building on a Legacy.'"

Not Knowing -- This Tuesday's note from Doug Greenlaw, Lockheed Martin, sums up why leaders must be learning years ahead of when the knowledge might be needed "Wanted to give you some feedback. I recently reorganized my department around the concepts that I learned from you at the Dell event years ago. I wanted you to know that I'm still getting tremendous value from the things you've taught me, and in particular from specific things we learned in your summits! Years later I am applying the things you exposed us to." To Doug's point, it drives me crazy when an executive tells me, since they are working on a specific initiative "that we don't have time right now to learn new ideas." It's not knowing what you don't know that is the biggest threat to your business. Out learning the competition matters! See you in Vegas next week!

3500 Year Old Principle; 100 Key Questions; 4 Types of Buyers; ROAR

"...out-learning the competition"

HEADLINES:

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
	Rudyard Kipling quoted in Roar

Tom Sant Webcast April 21, 4pm -- 6pm ET -- for those unable to join us in Vegas but would like to tune-in to a part of the Summit, we're streaming LIVE from the M Resort Tom Sant's keynote -- author of Persuasive Business Proposals (we all have to write them); Language of Success; and The Giants of Sales. He's also the creator of the famous software programs RFPMaster and ProposalMaster which improve win rates by 33%. Here's a link to sign-up -- $99/individual; $495 company license (view for a year).

ROAR!: Get Heard in the Sales and Marketing Jungle is the latest book by Kevin Daum along with fellow EOer Daniel Turner. Written as a business fable and available this week on Amazon, Kevin and Dan show how you can't communicate your message to all buyers in the same manner -- a fatal mistake made on websites, in marketing materials, and through personal communication. Here's a link to download the first 2 chapters for free -- take ten minutes to read (the whole book can be read in an hour or so)

3500 Year Old Principle -- In the Passover Seder, Jews are told to communicate to their four sons; the wise, the wicked, the simple and the son unable to ask. Kevin and Dan translate this to business as the Wise Buyer, the Cynical Buyer, the Simple Buyer and the Disinterested Buyer. In the book they show how to take your same value proposition message and make sure it's communicated on your website and other marketing materials in ways that appeal to all four buyers -- this is an original and clever insight -- congrats Kevin and Dan.

"VP" of Sales and Marketing -- but first you must get your VP right -- your Value Proposition. Beyond being a mere sentence, they use a three part framework: Pain, Solution, and Best Buyer. Download the first 2 chapters of their book for free and go right to Chapter 2 -- you'll see listed, a few pages in, a succinct example of a clear Value Proposition.

Construct Your Messages -- Once you have the VP, then it's time to construct your messages using these four steps (ROAR is the acronym):

	Recognize the buyer types
	Observe from their perspective
	Acknowledge who they are
	Resolve their need

Wise Buyer -- for instance, if you recognize you have a Wise Buyer, you need to recognize that they are never satisfied with the initial information you provide and will ask several unemotional questions to seek more information. You need to acknowledge this need for more, concise, information and get them the information they require. I had a Wise Buyer on the phone just this morning and Kevin and Dan's framework helped me close the sale.

100 Questions -- Once you have a compelling message and know how to communicate to the 4 buyers, Kevin and Dan point out you have to integrate that message consistently into your sales process and marketing program. No one has money or resources to waste on marketing programs that don't work and yet most of us don't take enough time to really think through each detail of our sales process. Kevin created this great tool that gives you over 100 questions to break down the experience of buying with your company. Answer the questions with your team and then you can design and measure marketing initiatives based on desired results. It's better to plan than hope.

Drive Top Line Revenue Growth -- Kevin will be keynoting the Fortune Sales & Marketing Summit next week in Vegas, the week his book is official released. Over the past few months I've highlighted seven important sales & marketing books written to help drive top line revenue growth. Read these books (or come learn directly from the authors at the Summit) to stay ahead of the competition, to garner ideas for improving your sales and marketing process, and to learn from other sales and marketing professionals of growth firms. See you next week in Vegas.

Hope for the US; Mindblowing Data; Rename War Room

"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

Hope for the U.S. -- David Brooks Op-Ed in the NY Times this week highlights Joel Kotkin's book The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. Demographics drive most economic trends and if trends hold, America will actually get younger, with only 25% of its population over 60 vs. 31% in China and 41% in Japan. He also highlights Stephen Rose's book Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger From the Financial Crisis which highlights some interesting data points re: wealth. Take five minutes and read this column. As Brooks sums up "the U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change."

Another Name for "War Room" -- Robert Kyslinger, Managing General Partner of Houston-based OMNIPOTECH has been searching around for another name for their executive meeting space besides "war" room or "situation" room, so he put a request out to his network of entrepreneurial friends. Do you have any ideas? Do you name all your meeting rooms? Nike names theirs after famous athletes, for instance.

Named After Core Values -- John MacInnes, President of Print Audit, noted "We call ours Fun. Typically our meeting/working rooms are named after our core values." This is another way to reinforce the culture. BTW, I couldn't help notice in MacInnes' email this line "Last year Print Audit customers used Rules to save 190,000 trees and $150 Million."

LEGO® Land -- besides being my children's favorite amusement park, Kyslinger emailed me back and said his CFO suggested calling the meeting room LEGO which is Danish for "Play Well" (LEg GOdt). In Latin it means "I assemble." And it just so happens that OMNIPOTECH's theme this year is "Play to Win" and Kyslinger is a rabid fan of LEGOs, which he has been collecting since 1973.

Serious Alignment -- Out of this concept have come ideas for placing a LEGO constructed blue and orange logo of their company in the middle of the conference room table; give out LEGOs as prizes; and have big buckets of LEGO around for people to fiddle with. And it wasn't lost on me that both LEGO and OMNIPOTECH use all caps for their respective logos. Alignment is fun when it works.

Serious Play -- Kyslinger also shared with me that LEGO has a business initiative called LEGO SERIOUS PLAY™. LEGO has a conviction that constructing a metaphorical 3-D model of your business in a playful manner will unleash your creative imagination to develop an innovative and dynamic business strategy based on a clearer sense of your company's identity. Might be a fun team exercise at a planning session.

Serious Creativity -- and while in Dubai on Tuesday for a series of presentations and interviews, Rockefeller Habits "super student" Thomas Lundgren, founder of a 14 store chain of The One furniture stores, showed me his new 3.0 store creation. No detail was overlooked, including writing on the inside of the elevators which in essence said "we're providing this writing on the inside of the elevator so you have something to read to make you more comfortable in the elevator."! And though he encourages people to bring their own bags for the small items you might purchase, if you need a bag he provides a biodegradable plastic bag, explaining that paper bags consume 8 times the petroleum to produce than his bags -- so much what people think is environment isn't. If in Dubai, you MUST see his new store. In the meantime, enjoy the enchanting music on his website when launched -- and then check out the "Fun Stuff" and his "Eargasm" section -- I listen to Thomas's choice of music while I'm doing email.

China Just Adds More Zeros -- with Tiger Woods in the news this week, the big news in China, while I was in Shanghai hosting a one-day Rockefeller Habits workshop yesterday, was the arrest of a business manager who cheated on his wife with over 500 women. She found his electronic diary on his computer where documented each tryst and stated his goal to have sex with 800 women (8 is a lucky number). He was actually arrested because he documented that many of the women were paid using bribes he had received! The Chinese press went wild over the story.

More Mind Blowing Data -- check out these infographics on WalMart from 1962 - present. I wasn't able to get the actual infograph to work, so go to this link.

What Makes Us Happy; Seven Questions for a Client Centered Proposal

"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

"If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words."
	Cicero as quoted in Persuasive Business Proposals

Small Font Size? -- just heard from Ray King, founder of AboutUs.org, that the font size of my insights shows up small in his in-box. Are any of the rest of you experiencing the same problem with the insights? The font size should be roughly the same as any email you receive. Please let me know -- thank you.

What Makes Us Happy? -- David Brooks, NY Times columnist, wrote an interesting peice this week summarizing what research shows makes us happy. My favorite few lines -- "The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income." It's the last line that particularly garnered my attention.

What About the Rest of the Executives? -- Members of various CEO organizations receive this "happiness" benefit of a monthly forum meeting -- but what about the rest the executives? Gazelles has been testing a monthly forum process with CFOs, COOs, HR, IT, Sales, and Marketing executives this past six months with 22 leading-edge growth firms. Given the initial positive feedback, we'll be rolling this out with 40 additional firms in the fall -- stay tuned.

What Doesn't Make Us Happy? -- writing proposals! Some of the very best executives, program managers, engineers, and consultants freeze up when they have to put what they know and what they're recommending on paper. You can make the best face-to-face presentation, but inevitably the client wants something in writing. And almost all major government contracts require a proposal. Tom Sant, the guru of proposal writing and author of Persuasive Business Proposals, even has research showing that sales people will often skip going after multi-million opportunities because they don't want to submit the necessary proposals!

What A Proposal Isn't? -- Tom Sant, who has taught thousands of top executives how to write winning proposals, notes "Writing a winning proposal isn't a matter of content. It's a matter of structure and process. Say the right things in the right order and you'll win." What his book focuses on is the process -- the steps to follow to develop and write a clear, compelling, persuasive proposal -- the same methodology Sant uses when he works directly with a client.

Seven Questions for a Client-Centered Proposal -- I'm a huge fan of the right questions, and Sant has seven that drive writing a winning proposal (I would get his book and go right to that section of the book for the details). Here are the seven questions:

1.     What is the client's problem or need?

2.     What makes this problem worth solving? What makes this need worth addressing?

3.     What goals must be served by whatever action is taken?

4.     What goal has the highest priority?

5.     What product/applications/services can I offer that will solve the problem or meet the need?

6.     What results are likely to follow from each of my potential recommendations?

7.     Comparing these results to the customer's desired outcomes or goals, which recommendation is best?

Sant also has twelve questions for developing a consultative proposal -- powerful list.

The Language of Success (Email). This is the title of Sant's latest book and focuses on general business writing, especially email. The key is eliminating jargon and developing a straight forward approach to communicating your message. BTW, my one "must" re: emails -- that the subject line must match the email. Often in email strings the subject of the email changes but no one has changed the subject line to match! The other "must" is communicating just one main idea in an email. If there are several subjects, write a separate email to the same person covering each subject -- that way they can forward to and copy the people appropriate to the specific topic. And I'm more likely to get a response to a single-subject email then if I stick multiple subjects in a single email.

The Giants of Sales -- Sant also wrote one of my favorite classic sales books entitled The Giants of Sales: What Dale Carnegie, John Patterson, Elmer Wheeler, and Joe Girard Can Teach You About Real Sales Success. Some sales fundamentals never change and Sant has gleaned the best from these four fathers of sales. At a minimum, if you're a sales professional, you should know the history and giants of your own profession and their timeless knowledge. NOTE: Elmer Wheeler's classic book Tested Sentences that Sell is another must read -- I was blown away by the insight and power of using one simple word vs. another -- particularly powerful in the internet world of sales.

Tom Sant Webcast -- Keynoting our Fortune Sales & Marketing Summit we'll also broadcast Tom's presentation LIVE from the Summit via an online seminar -- 4pm -- 6pm ET Wednesday, April 21. Learn from one of the true giants of sales right from your desktop if you're unable to attend the entire Summit.