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The Quality You Need To Look For In Any Person You Hire

When MSP and IT services business owners open their business, it’s usually because of their love of the tech work. The aspects of running the business, including marketing and managing staff often come later…and at a price.

So this week, I wanted to share a good question about employees that comes with a direct answer. Hiring the wrong people is stressful and expensive, this advice can save you time and money.

Q: In what ways do you motivate employees to be like owners?

A: You don’t. They’re not the owner – you are. If an employee had “ownership” mentality, they wouldn’t work for you; they’d start their own business.

A better question: How do you get employees to “own” their job so they deliver excellent performance and results? Read full article and comment →

4 Questions You MUST Answer With Your Marketing

Which leads me to this week’s post. There are four tough, good questions to ask whenever you prepare an ad, e-mail, letter, brochure, website, etc.

1. Why should anyone READ it (or watch, listen, go to your booth, etc.)?
2. Why should anyone care about what you’re saying?
3. Why should they believe YOU or listen to you?
4. Why should anyone respond IMMEDIATELY?

As stated, TOUGH questions. The marketplace is saturated right now with CHOICES. No one is desperately in need of anything you sell, and it’s best you start with THAT premise rather than believing people are hankering for what you sell and interested in what you do. Desire and interest must be manufactured. Read full article and comment →

Use This Strategy To Grow Your Business In 2020

So here it is: JVs, or joint ventures – also known as strategic partnerships, promotional partners and affiliate marketing. Fair warning, the strategy comes with assembly required (a.k.a. hard work). Like EVERYTHING, it is not an easy button that solves all your woes; however, it IS by far my favorite way of acquiring customers for many, many reasons.

Clients acquired by JVs are akin to referrals on steroids. To that end, they are in a far better frame of mind when meeting with you, which means they close much easier, are less price-sensitive and tend to be better clients overall. The cost of acquisition is also far lower than traditional lead generation to a cold list; in many cases, the cost is $0. Read full article and comment →

Bill Gates And Warren Buffett’s Single Most Important Factor To Success

The new year has started and we’re back in full force around here. I have and will again share ideas with you to kick off the new year for your business. But this week, I wanted to speak directly to you, the person, about the one factor that can drive success in any initiative you have planned for the year.

A quick story: When Bill Gates first met Warren Buffett at a dinner party, their host, Gates’s mother, asked everyone around the table to identify what they believed was the single most important factor in their success through life and write it on a card. The story goes that both Buffett and Gates gave the same one-word answer, without collaboration or discussion of what it should be. And both provided the same answer: “Focus.”

The BIGGER question: what are you CONSTANTLY focusing ON?

I don’t mean “focus” this time as a time-management strategy, although it certainly is. I’m suggesting you consider “focus” as a lens through which you are filtering all experiences, a way of “seeing” situations, people and YOURSELF. Read full article and comment →

Resolve To Boost Your Revenue By NOT Doing These 6 Things

Everyone wants to know what they should DO to be successful in selling, but success is as much about what you DON’T do as what you choose to do. Many salespeople sabotage their own success and make a lot less money simply because they routinely repeat the following six bad habits: Read full article and comment →

The 12 “Musts” Of Marketing

As you read this, someone, somewhere is being stumped by the lyrics of “The 12 Days of Christmas.” I know I can’t recite them all without a little help. And that’s ok, because today I gift to thee a more profitable list of 12. If you can remember this list and put it to work correctly in your business, the gifts (profits) will be plentiful!

1. A HIGHLY TARGETED LIST. Without a doubt, the list is the single most important element of any campaign. It should direct not only the communication (what it says) but also the media used, the offer made, the copy and follow-up. Most do not spend sufficient time building, cleaning and organizing their lists, which is why they waste so much time and money on failed marketing attempts.
2. AN ATTENTION-GETTING HEADLINE. The headline is one of the single most important elements of your campaign because its job is to “sell the ad” and grab your prospect’s attention and cause them to want to read and pay attention. To work, it must telegraph the big idea, news or a big promise, arousing curiosity and aligning with the thoughts and feelings of your ideal prospect.
3. A REALLY COMPELLING OFFER. What could you offer that is so attention-getting and curiosity-arousing, so valuable, so interesting, that your prospect would immediately click, call or respond? To work, your offer has to, in some manner, benefit the prospect AND align with what you sell (giving away a free drone will get attention and response, but may not lead to selling a managed services contract).
4. STRONG SALES COPY. As Zig quipped, timid salespeople have skinny kids. True dat. This trips up a LOT of people who feel uncomfortable with strong, direct sales copy designed to elicit a response by tapping on emotions, but softening the message only leads to a suppressed response.
5. REASON WHY COPY. If you are offering something of value, be certain to explain why you’re targeting them. For example, we include a “lift note” in our weekly prospecting campaign to explain why we are sending the letter to THEM specifically.
6. A DEADLINE OR OTHER URGENCY. An offer without a deadline or some other scarcity or urgent reason to respond NOW is not really an offer. Yes, there are times when you cannot genuinely have scarcity (like an evergreen offer on your website), but in all other campaigns, you can and should find a way to require a response by X date or offer something to the first Y who respond. Further, the deadline cannot be more than a few days away; giving until the end of the month is a surefire way to take all the punch out of a deadline.
7. MULTIPLE WAYS TO RESPOND. Give a phone number, e-mail and web page for prospects to respond to your offer. Some simply won’t go online and prefer to e-mail you or call. Others will only go online and complete a web form.
8. CLEAR INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO RESPOND. Just like with selling, you need to instruct the prospect on what to do now. When I’m selling from a stage, I repeat, multiple times, that they should complete the form, walk to the back of the room and hand the form to one of my team members who are waiting to hand them a welcome kit/gift. In all marketing, you MUST instruct the prospect specifically what to do now.
9. FOLLOW UP, FOLLOW UP, FOLLOW UP! Ideally with multimedia sequencing of online and offline communications. If you’re not going to do this, don’t bother sending the initial correspondence.
10. TRACKING AND MEASUREMENT. This INCLUDES phone calls inbound as well as web-form leads. I would also track the “shy yes” prospects (not just the “on fire” leads) who are interested, but cannot, will not buy TODAY for various reasons, to ensure you stay on top of the opportunity until the egg hatches.
11. SUFFICIENT QUANTITY. Given most B2B marketing for prospects produces a .5% to 1% response rate, you have to keep in mind that sending 25 letters a week may not result in a landslide of opportunities the first week you send it. It may take two to three months of weekly prospecting before you get a true sense of the response to a campaign.
12. CONSISTENCY. At this year’s Roadshow, I stressed the importance of WEEKLY prospecting so that you get in the habit of and continually improve your prospecting and list building efforts. Most occasionally prospect, stopping whenever they get busy, don’t feel like doing it, get bored and decide to try something new, etc. If you really want to build a business, you cannot let a single week go by without some type of prospecting effort.

Do you feel like you just received a gift and the user manual was in a different language? If so, we can help! Schedule a FREE one-on-one consultation today. During the call, you’ll receive another gift, our proprietary marketing roadmap customized just for you! Go to www.technologymarketingtoolkit.com/consult

10 Questions You Should Ask Of Any Sales Person You Interview

FIRST and foremost: you hunt and constantly look. They are out there, although scarce; and when they DO start to look, you need to be present and findable.

That means you ought to be running ads 24/7/365. You don’t have to hire everyone. BE selective. Only hire the “HELL YES,” not the maybes. A productive salesperson puts money in your pocket, so they aren’t a risk.

NEXT: Build systems and processes that can make a good salesperson GREAT, so you don’t need to find the rare superstar but can have a very profitable and productive business on good people.

THIRD: Interview well to avoid wasting time and money on duds. To this last point, I recently shared the following list with a Rapid Implementation class that was asking me about how to interview a great salesperson. It’s 10 questions I’ll send to a candidate after reviewing their résumé and determining that, on paper, they look like someone I’d like to interview.

Read full article and comment →

Don’t Finalize Your 2020 Plan… Or Your Christmas Shopping Without These 2 Marketing Fundamentals

Raise your hand if you’ve ever bought a gift, confident that the recipient would absolutely love it, and totally missed the mark. As in, sleeping on the couch or in the doghouse, missed the mark.

You probably based your gift buying decision on your own opinion or something you thought the recipient might need, but not what they actually want. It’s also easy to make this mistake with your marketing.

‘Tis the season for both holiday shopping and annual planning, so I’m here to give you some advice that could make your Christmas a little brighter and your New Year more profitable. Believe it or not, the principle is very similar.

The CORE of what I teach is summed up in a favorite quote from my long-term mentor Nido Qubein: “Who your customer is today is a piece of data; who your customer should be is a piece of strategy.” Read full article and comment →