Learning Anything?

A few short years ago Agriculture ceased to be the number one occupation for humankind. It was overtaken by the Services industry. This is momentous news given that this is the first time more humans were occupied by something other than agriculture in over 10,000 years.

Learning and teaching are clearly the currency of the future. 66% of us are already knowledge workers. This is where the real leverage in today’s society and economy are. Simply put, the people who can learn and teach effectively will be the people who have the most success in the future. I recently attended a conference on the topic and decided to share my notes with you… enjoy!

Our obstacles to learning:
First off, the two greatest obstacles to learning are:

1. I already knew that.
2. I disagree.

As you read this material, you will probably have those reactions a few times.

One of the reasons could be that you’re an entrepreneur (or an aspiring entrepreneur.) As an entrepreneur it’s likely you’re a “difference” person. That means your brain is very adept at spotting the differences between things.

Some people are “sameness” people, some people are “difference” people. (There are also mis-matchers who are the “yeah, but…” people.) None of these types are good or bad, they’re just different ways of looking at the world.

There tend to be more “difference” people among entrepreneurs… so the odds are pretty good that you’re a difference person, which would make you especially vulnerable to these two obstacles of “I already knew that” and “I disagree”.

In any case, please try to fight those two urges as you read this. It will be a huge obstacle to your learning process.

Guidelines for optimal learning:
a) Don’t become too invested in your positions… things are bound to change and
b) Never believe anything too much

In other words, stay open to learnings and change. Otherwise you will stop learning.

Every time you say “I already knew that”, you are closing the door and preventing yourself from learning. Every time you say “I disagree” you are blocking yourself from learning.

Become “not me”

Another key to learning is becoming “not me”… if you lock into your current self-image and behaviors, then you lock yourself out of learning.

You want to become “systematically outrageous”.

You want to be open to new experiences and new learnings. If you aren’t, then you’re not going to grow. You’re not going to change. You’re going to keep getting what you’ve gotten in the past.

Do what you’ve always done and your going to get what you’ve always got.

Get outside yourself. Become not me. Stay open. MOVE OUTSIDE YOUR COMFORT ZONE. Learn.

Learning = behavioral change

Perhaps you’ve already had some insights and ‘aha’ moments in the past. Maybe you even get a surge of adrenalin or good feeling in your body when you make such a connection.

No real learning takes place with an insight… It’s just trivia, or data collection until you use that insight to create some behavioral change in yourself.

Some attendees stated: “I’ve learned to get very clear on the specific steps I need to get to create my vision and attain my goal.”

Sounds specific, right?

Well sorry… that’s not learning either. There is actually nothing specific or measurable in the statement.

To turn that into real learning, you would need to state something like: “For the next 10 days, when I sit down at my computer the first thing I do is close my eyes and visualize my day for sixty seconds. I then write down my action plan for the day.”

It’s kind of like taken something that you have read and putting it to work for you and then measuring the effectiveness.

Here’s a way to judge whether you have had a real learning experience. If a week later you asked 10 objective people to judge whether you had actually changed your behavior, would the learning be specific and measurable for them to come to a simple conclusion?

It took many of us a few days to get a real learning experience under our belt. Mine was a simple learning, but it was very specific and measurable. It had specific time frames and specific actions. And over the next 20 years that learning will probably have an enormous impact on my life.

The reason it took me and everyone else a long time to achieve this learning objective is primarily because we are all masters of self-deception. But the benefits are rewarding when you get there. It will likely change your life.

Give it a try…. Be specific. Be Measurable.
or just plain get out there and learn, learn learn.

Twitter For Business?

Twitter for business?

Lets start by covering what Twitter is, then we will check out the different ways Twitter can be used, followed by ways to implement your fresh knowledge to create value for your business.

So exactly what is Twitter?

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, SMS,  or external applications (like the Twitter iPhone app).If you want to group conversations or categorize tweets, then consider using hashtags. These are words or phrases prefixed with a ‘#’. A search for “beer” would turn up all messages that included the word beer, a search for #beerfest2009 would turn up all tweets that included the hashtag ‘beerfest2009’ in the tweet. So when you want to track tweets about your brand, ask people to insert a hashtag (one that you create – remember that the hashtag must be unique in order to distinguish the relevant tweets from noise)

[flashvideo file=http://b6-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/twitter-how-to.flv /]

The first step is to create a Twitter account, this is fairly easy process, and you will end up with an account for your marketing campaign at Twitter like this: http://twitter.com/box_online. Remember to create separate accounts whose names are related to the product/service you are going to promote, even if you have a personal Twitter account. This will look more professional in the long run to have a dedicated following comprised exclusively of the target audience and will allow you to keep your personal account for your more quirky personal tweets (i.e., individual posts to Twitter).

Customize the profile. Once the account has been created, tweak the profile details to make it attractive to the target audience. Add an original logo, match the color of the profile with that of the logo, include keywords about the product/service to be promoted, add pictures and bits of information which are interesting and usable and fill in all the sidebar information.

Put badges on the website. Putting badges on the website and the web pages related to the promotion will allow the visitors to the website to follow you on Twitter. Twittercounter and Twittergrader badges are recommended for this purpose.

Seek followers. This is the most important aspect of Twitter, whether you are doing it for personal reasons or for a marketing advantage. Web marketers seek quality followers from the business vertical in which they are promoting their product or service. This can be done by going through the profiles and tweets posted by various followers and getting noticed by contributing to their conversations.

Jump in and reply to interesting @-reply tweets, which are public conversations between two users. [If they expect a conversation to be private, they should be “direct messaging” (DM) each other instead.] Check out both parties and “follow” them if they interest you. If you follow someone with, say, 10,000 followers and reply to his/her posts meaningfully for long enough, chances are good that he/she will start to reply to you and start following you.

Retweeting means forwarding someone else’s tweet to your own follower list. Proper retweeting can go a long way in gaining invaluable followers who are very popular themselves. Credit your Tweet source by adding their @ tag; e.g., when Box_Online, whom you follow, sends out, “Great new productivity site at http://b6group.com/,” retweet it to your list as “RT @Box_Online: Great new productivity site at http://b6group.com.” If you have characters to spare, you can spell out ReTweet. If someone with 10,000 followers retweets your posts, their followers may retweet your post and so on, with the potential for massive exposure.

A Break-Down of Tweet Topics During A Recent Event: WordPress WordCamp SF

Does It Actually Work?
Here are some examples of companies that are using Twitter in various methods.
@DellOutlet : Sales : Additional sales channel to sell refurbished products.
@HomeDepot : Marketing : Allows people to get more information on the products that they needed or wanted.
@JetBlue : Customer Service : 600,000 followers to let Customers know about upgrades, delays etc…
@IBM / Sun : B2B :  for events, and new product launches.
Do this:
@JeffreyHayzlett : CMO Kodak
@DellOutlet : Not always pitching… talking about adding value, they also follow their other brands.
@CNN : Strong bio, links back to the site, follow the followers
@IBM : Events, B2B group, partner channels, design group… if you are in the
design business, you are not going to know about IBM Design… you will
search for IBM.. and via Twitter you will find it if the brands are
also followed on the IBM Tweet.
@DunkinDonuts : Good logo, good following, offering feedback for not having shops in a given state.
@ScottMonty  : Personal dialog.
@zappos: Taken their brand and presorted it for you, provides insight into
behind the scenes ops, used as a contest & feedback mechanism to
better involve and serve customers.
Not this:
@ FujifilmInkjet : No dialog
@ofc : Same 5 posts re-written 40 times selling products.
@GU : No bio, no links back to their main site.
@Microsoft : Zero posts.
@ Subway : No presence but the brand is one of the most talked about brands on Twitter.
@nissan : Dealerships are followed but no dialog, no persona, no spokesman.

Can You Implement A Twitter Strategy Now?

Your new Twitter account is a key to a successful online pull marketing campaign.  Using your new account can help you to research what people are saying about your brand or topics related to your business. Using API’s like Twittervision API, you can even figure out where people are talking about which topics. You can Tweet about your products and services to attract Consumer attention to your brand.  Once you have a solid following, its time to spread information and content in order to attract Consumers to your website where you can give them value and convert prospects into leads. Consider using tiny urls as a way to save space and lead Customers to content.  Twitter is an excellent medium to use for promoting company events, remember to create a hashtag (#) for your event that will not only inform Customers regarding event details, but also provide a forum for valuable feedback. Remember to post your press releases to keep Customers up to date.

If you have any questions, or would like to recieve a Twitter marketing process map, please feel free to contact us at anytime.

What Are Vendor – Client Relationships Like These Days?

Rather than reading my take on this balancing act of graft vs PC norms… allow me to put you into the shoes of a few service providers that deal daily with people who want the moon and stars but insist on running their departments on pre-established budgets.

Enjoy the video and let us know if we might be able to help you implement processes to minimize such nonsense in your sales & purchasing cycles.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2a8TRSgzZY

Did you know this about SEO?

Here are a few facts that most people don’t know about Ranking their sites in the Search Engines:

1 – Any Page that you make and publish creates Google Page Rank that is greater than ZERO.

This violates the 1st Law of Thermodynamics
“Matter (Page Rank) is neither created nor destroyed”.

Google doesn’t care. Every time you publish a web page and it gets crawled, it gets assigned Page Rank just for existing.

That means that the more legitimate, non-duplicate pages you have on your site, the more you can affect your OWN rankings with internal links!

2 – Duplicate Content “OFF-SITE” is practically irrelevant.

“ON-SITE” Duplicate Content will kill your rankings.

3 – Your Web Page Template (Navigation Links, Footer Content, Side Bar Content) counts in the Duplicate Content calculation.

That means if your Web Page Template’s content has 200 words, and the rest of the content on your page is 50 words, you probably have Duplicate content issues.

4 – The Google Cache Date of any web page can indicate the relative power of the links on that page.

The more CURRENT (Fresher) Google’s Cache date of a web page is, the more likely that the links on that page are getting counted. If the page cache is CONSTANTLY getting updated, that’s a pretty strong sign that the links are getting counted MORE than a page where the cache date is OLD.

Want to optimize your site for the search engines so that you improve your position and ranking?
Then let us know about your needs by clicking here

Meetings don’t have to Waste Our Time

In order to make sure that your meetings are both effective and efficient, here are a few suggestions that have worked well.

1. Create and distribute an agenda in advance and be sure that the meeting’s objectives are clearly stated.

2. Begin on time, end on time and stay focused to accomplish your goals.

3. Increase retention by eliminating distractions – require that email and other forms of text messaging be turned off during the meeting and do not tolerate distractions caused by mobile phones – simply turn them off and use voice mail.

4. Respect attendees time – If a person is only needed briefly – no need for them to sit through the entire session.

5. Accomplish the primary objective during the meeting’s allotted time.

6. Use technology. You have a phone, you have your agenda… set the phone to vibrate every 10 minutes so that you have a physical reminder that the meeting needs to move forward.

7. Have a person take notes and follow up with distributing the meeting protocol.

That’s it folks… it doesn’t get much easier than that.

Investing… When is it ‘the right time’?

I decided that NOW is the best time to invest…
and you can quote me on that one.

Hey, it beats the heck out of Clients calling to cancel projects because they decided to act like
blinded deer at night standing in front of a speeding truck full of ‘industrial disease’.

I don’t care what anyone says… now us the time to invest… if not in the markets, then in ourselves.

Get out there and learn something new.

shameless plug: we give exciting courses on how you can dramatically increase your sales even in slow markets – hack, we even back it up with proof from our Clients and a money back guarantee… are you brave enough to challenge yourself?

Features, Advantages and Benefits

Hey there,

Why is it that most people in business think that they are going to sell what they have by delivering a list of features along with a few reasons why someone should buy their product?

The truth is that there is a much deeper psychological process behind making a decision to buy something than most business people realize.

When selling to Consumers, the pitch must appeal to a buyer’s emotions or the sale is simply not going to take place. When selling B2B, keep in mind that the buyer is still a human being with needs and a strong desire to succeed – a benefits oriented approach has been proven to be more successful than any other technique we tested during the past 20 years.

If you’re ready to sell something, we are ready to help you create a winning pitch.

The first step is a bit of homework so grab a pencil and some paper and get ready to answer a few questions:

• Write down a list of your competitors and their websites
• Write down what they’re doing, what they’re offering etc.
• List their product’s benefits

Ahh, now we come to the core purpose of this article…

Do you know the difference between features, advantages and benefits?

A feature is what a product has. In essence, the core components of your product or service; sometimes referred to as the bells and whistles or buttons, knobs, levers, switches, format, platform etc.

An advantage is what the product does or how it performs against a competitive product. A vacuum for example, is a product that might have the advantage that it doesn’t need bags. Another advantage would be that it can clean the floor in a room without you being present. In a services business one advantage would be the number of years of experience you bring to the table or your level of certification. Some common advantages include words like fast, easy, simple, cheap and good.

A benefit is what a given feature means to your prospect in terms of emotions and passion. A true benefit goes really deep and says something about how it makes you feel – a really great benefit gets a consumer excited because it means something special to the buyer.

Here’s a good example. One of my Clients sells a facial cream online and she called it something like, microderm abrasion emulsion – essentially it is a cream that helps reduce wrinkles.

On her website she listed several features such as ‘it reduces wrinkles’, ‘it comes in an easy to use home care kit’, ‘it is pH balanced’ etc etc etc.

When she came to me to help increase sales, conversions and traffic… I asked her to:
Take a piece of paper and create three columns.
List as many features as you can in the first column.
In the second column, list what you believe are the top benefits.
She wrote down ‘because it reduces wrinkles, it makes you look younger’ and ‘because it comes in a home care kit, it is easy to use at home’ and the third one was ‘because it is pH balanced, it’s gentle on your skin’.

As politely as possible I let her know that those are really advantages not benefits so we continued the exercise and I asked her to list in the third column what she felt the ultimate end result for her Customer was going to be – in other words, ‘the ultimate benefit’.

Here is what she wrote:
‘If it makes you look younger: then it means you’ll be more attractive, you’ll get that promotion at work, you’ll feel more confident, nobody will know your true age, you’ll fall in love all over again and you’ll be able to attract that person you’ve had your eye on.’

‘Since it’s easy to use at home: you won’t suffer embarrassment by going to a doctor’s office, you don’t have to waste time, it’s like a face lift in a jar in the comfort and privacy of your own home.’

‘Since it’s gentle on your skin: there are no risks, no pain, no healing periods like surgery or those harsh chemical peels people usually buy.’

We had arrived…
These were descriptions of how Customers would feel before, during and after they used the product.

In a very short time she was able to list several of the true benefits her product offers to her Customers. She took this piece of paper and changed her website to reflect the benefits. She also adapted every piece of marketing material including all advertising (online and offline), all landing pages, sales letters and Customer communications and within 2 months her sales doubled. One month later sales doubled again. Then she adapted the packaging to reflect the new text and sales doubled again. Sure we did some work on conversions and 6 months later, she was not able to buy as much traffic as she wanted – not even from Google ,Yahoo and MSN combined… Folks, this stuff really works! I’ll let you guess if I am referring to the creme or the marketing process here.

Remember, real benefits go deep. They live within the emotional and passionate sweet spot of the person wanting or using your product. In order to increase your sales you will need to tap into that sweet spot and then use the real benefits in everything you produce to help sell the product.

What is Lateral Thinking and Do I Need It?

Two of the services we frequently use with our Clients are Idea Generation and Problem Solving. We approach both challenges with very different, process oriented methods but there is one thing that remains constant – Our ability to think laterally and come up with novel concepts by looking at situations in new and different ways. Many of our Clients are so deeply involved in an issue such as their daily business that they find it hard to change perspective and see things from an alternative angle. This is where we come in… we tend to see things that are ‘outside the box’.

Vertical thinking, also known as logical thinking, takes an idea and carries it forward. Lateral thinking, on the other hand, provokes fresh ideas and essentially changes the frame of reference in almost any situation. Vertical thinking tries to overcome problems by dealing with them head-on, lateral thinking attempts to bypass obstacles using a variety of different approaches.

In essence, Lateral thinking is a tool that helps us change our way of thinking about something often by modifying our perceptions.

With logical thinking you start out with certain given components and boundaries wrapped in a process. This is similar to the situation in chesswhere you start out with specific pieces and are expected to play by the rules. The issue is that in most real life situations, we can not use the chess model or logical thinking to solve problems because you don’t know what the pieces are, what they represent or how many pieces actually exist… knowing the rules is almost irrelevant to solving a problem or generating new ideas.

Throughout our lives we are handed several different rulebooks (cultural, social, business oriented etc). When we get these rulebooks we just assume that the components that the rulebooks refer to, simply exist and we tend to accept that certain boundaries and limitations are present because they were mentioned in the rulebook. Lateral thinking throws out the rules and assumptions as well as the boundaries and limitations so that we are free of our social, cultural, geographic and demographic bonds.

Lateral thinking focuses on changing some element to enable a new and fresh perspective of a given situation. Lateral thinking deals primarily with perception. By using lateral thinking techniques we can organize the external world into the pieces that we can then process. Perhaps more importantly, by observing lateral thinking in others we can generate new ideas and better understand how they perceive the world around them.

The brain is a self-organizing information system that forms asymmetric patterns. In such systems there is a mathematical need for moving across patterns. The tools and processes of lateral thinking are designed to achieve such lateral movement to accomplish a given result.

A famous person once said that you can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper. Think about that for a moment… If you were driving in a car on the highway but your intended destination is behind you, driving faster while keeping the car on the same heading will not get you to your intended destination.

If you were to continue thinking about a problem or a solution in a given way, this may not be as useful as changing tact and trying something completely different. Additional effort in the same direction will not necessarily help you get the results you were after but applying some proven tools designed to turn the car around, may offer you options that you never knew existed. It’s a format of thinking ‘out of the box’ and our Clients believe that we are very good at it. It may be because we do it frequently.

If you have a challenging problem or need some new ideas, please, fill out our form and allow us to get in touch with you today.

What Exactly is Marketing?

Marketing is: The science of finding prospects and turning them into profitable Customers for your business. Let’s have a look at the 3 core elements in this statement:
– Science:
When I use the word ‘science’ here, I am referring to the methods and approaches that have been carefully tested and refined over time that deliver successful results. In marketing, doing things right incorporates metrics to measure results, testing to understand what works best and ROI accountability to know what elements and methods deliver a better return over time.

Here at BoxOnline we have been testing and retesting hundreds of approaches since our launch in 1999. We have followed the scientific method to eliminate all sorts of approaches that do not work well. We have also identified a few amazingly good approaches that seem to deliver exactly what our Client’s want time and time again. These sort of methods are what we refer to as proven methods. Today, we only offer proven methods to our Clients.

– Finding Prospects:
We often start by building a profile of your prospect(s) so that when your sales message reaches one, it connects with them and they find your offer irresistible. If we did not do this, the sales message would likely fall on deaf ears.

– Turning them into profitable Customers:
Our objective is to persuade prospects to act in a measurable way. We want to be able to measure our performance and know how well a given approach is working and what the difference is after a change has been made to a campaign.

Our marketing formula is based on something that has been dubbed the Business Friendship Model.

Consider how people make friends. The actual process is:
1) Get someone’s attention
2) Connect with them based on a common theme
3) Emotionally commit to do something with each other in the future
4) Act on the commitment by getting together again or doing something thoughtful for them such as buying a gift.

Often a business owner wants his business to appear larger and mightier than it actually is and thus they try to create an image of being a large corporate firm. We rarely support this sort of thinking because our experience has shown that when you try to behave like a big company, you de-personalize your relationship with prospects. In our research, small businesses grew faster when they were fueled by relationships rather than by expensive image campaigns.

So, what does a business typically do when they want to build a relationship with a new prospect?
1) Run Ads to get their attention
2) Relate to the prospect in the Ad
3) Get prospect to respond and commit emotionally
4) Get prospects to act

Well, Consumers don’t necessarily want to follow this process because they have needs of their own and based on our experience here is what prospects actually want:
1) that you, (the business) pay attention to them
2) that you, want to connect with them
3) that you, want to make a commitment to help them
4) that you, want to act on that commitment and are ready to deliver a desirable result to them

Does this make sense to you? If you are able to think like a prospect, it should. If it doesn’t, let us know… We’d love to hear your opinion – especially if you have a product to sell.

The Brutal Reality of Global Cost Comparisons

In the US building a 4 lane highway 10 miles long typically takes a year if the labor unions cooperate and the ecologists and government authorities are in sync. In Europe this same distance would typically take around 5 years and then there are still many obstacles to overcome each of which could delay the project months if not years.

In China however, roads 3 times this distance are constructed in less than a year and if that weren’t enough, in 2007 they also added another 2 lanes to the projects I studied and still managed to deliver on time and within budget using western resources for planning and supervision and local labor for the grunt work. Yes, the quality was similar to what one would expect to encounter in the west.

Another interesting example comes to us from one of the largest hospitals in Switzerland near Bern. We attended a conference where the director of this hospital was proudly announcing that with a staff of 4,000 he served 170,000 out-patients in 2007. He wanted to improve his statistics and was planning to meet with the Swiss minister of finance and the minister of health to come up with ways to fund a staff increase so that he could serve even more people in his new and ‘extremely efficient’ Swiss hospital.

I had the privilege of accompanying a delegation from Taiwan on part of their European tour a few years ago. You should have seen the expression on the Swiss hospital director’s face when the Taiwanese delegation leader mentioned that they had fewer beds than the Swiss hospital but an equal number of employees. Yet when it came to patients served, the hospital in Taiwan showed the Swiss how inefficient their business model was. The room went silent as the leader of the delegation pointed out that his hospital served 1,400,000 out-patient cases in the same period.