The Psychology of Sales

Sure, there are boatloads of books on this topic so I’ll do my best to keep this article brief, helpful and to the point. First, this page is dedicated to the many kind folks I meet each day who really need help selling their products and services.

Products and services are wonderful things from both the perspective of the consumer or Customer and the person or company that is offering or selling the products and services. For starters, the consumer gets some form of benefit from the products or services otherwise there would be little reason to purchase them. The seller, likewise receives a benefit in the form of compensation, usually monetary. The difference is that the consumer gets value whether perceived or real from the transaction or the receipt of the product / service.

How the consumer perceives this value is the topic of this article today.

From here on out when I mention the word ‘products’, please understand that I mean both products and services.

Here are my suggestions when you want to sell a product to a given target market.

1) Know your target market well.

That means that you need to understand who they are, how they tick, what they like and dislike etc. If you have hundreds or thousands of Customers this goes for you too – that is what databases are for!

Let’s start with something basic like Motivation Strategies.
Are your Customers motivated TOWARD something or Motivated AWAY FROM something?
If you were to ask them why they purchased your product, what would they say?
More importantly, what would you learn from their response?

If you were to ask your Customers something neutral such as “What did they do this past weekend?” and then follow up the question with “Why did you do X this past weekend?” Chances are good that you will learn something about their motivation strategy.

If they were to answer that they “went to the mountains to ski” this would indicate that the person is likely to be motivated TOWARD something and thus, they tend to know what they want and they will move toward their goal of getting what they want.

If the response to question 2 were “to get out of the city” then you might guess that this person is motivated AWAY FROM something and this sort of individual knows exactly what they don’t want.

In order to sell to these two very different types of people, you need to be able to identify their motivation strategy quickly and then apply a marketing tactic even quicker. Your first step is to create two sets of marketing tools from business cards and form letters to signs, messages and selling phrases that you will learn by heart. Your purpose is to communicate with your prospect effectively using their choice of motivation strategy so that your message is accepted with gratitude and your offer is given priority consideration.

If you wanted to sell a massage to a person that is motivated AWAY FROM something, your marketing message may be something like:

– Want to relieve stress?
Come visit our Spa on the 3rd floor right now.
(special offer limited to the first 5 people, today only)

– Need to get away from it all?
Experience our 100 minute vacation
(Hurry, we only have 4 slots left)

If you wanted to sell the very same massage to a person that is motivated TOWARD something, your marketing message may be something like:

– Are you ready to relax?
Our experienced massage therapists are waiting for you on the 3rd floor.
(special offer for first time Clients – today only)

– Would you like a treatment that is usually only offered to top athletes?
Sign up for a medical massage on the 3rd floor today – there are only a few slots left.

In addition to knowing your Client’s motivation strategy, learn all you can about them and take notes so that you can communicate in a very personal and meaningful way in the future. For example, if you do not see a Client after several weeks, why not send them a thank you note for their last visit and mention a few personal things in the note that would perhaps encourage them to get back in touch with you. When they contact you, present them an offer that they would find hard to resist.

2) Always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS include a benefit in your marketing message. Just to be clear, I am referring to a benefit that your Customer experiences when they do business with you.

3) Incorporate some form of scarcity in your offer – there may be thousands of X available but to many people, the perception of scarcity is a very powerful magnet.

4) Upsell and Cross Sell at the appropriate moment but do it as often as possible. This is a lesson learned from McDonalds and it pays off royally. Have you ever been to a restaurant where they asked you if you wanted fries with your order? That would be an example of a cross sell. If you heard someone ask a Customer if they wanted a large order of fries for only 20 cents more, that would be an example of an upsell. Do not miss out on this essential element of profit building unless you really want to leave money on the table.

5) Practice each of the above suggestions with Clients, Customers, Prospects, Friends – you have nothing to lose

6) Test variations of the above to improve your results and keep track of what works and what does not work.

7) Reserve time in your schedule for building relationships. Many of our Clients are so busy delivering products that they forget to keep relationships warm. The result is that they have to work extra hard to acquire more new business. It is much easier to keep a Client than it is to find a new one so, spend a few hours each week, keeping tabs on your Customers and going out of your way for the ones you really want to keep. The idea is to grow the business you do with your best Customers in such a way that you build a lifetime of value into the relationship. Build those relationships and they will pay off big time.

Naturally, we offer our Clients courses in the above areas with the implied benefit that knowledge will increase their sales but we do things a bit differently over here. We select our Clients very carefully, only a few applicants are accepted each time we open the doors but those that make it through have a compelling business case and a determined desire to succeed. These are the kind of folks we enjoy helping. We could guarantee that our methods will double your sales or you get your money back but instead, we often opt for a success based fee thus, we only get paid if our efforts deliver results. Have you ever worked with a company like that before? Come on, give it a try and apply for a chance to be one of our top performing, revenue generating Clients today.

SEO Lessons from the Field 1

This is the first of a series of posts we are going to publish on state of the art search engine optimization techniques to help you rank your site organically in the top search engines as high as possible for your top keyword phrases.

There are two main areas that search engines consider when they’re deciding how to rank your page and the first is what you publish on your page and how relevant that is to what people are actually searching for. We call these on-page elements. The good news is that you can optimize on-page elements easily. All you need to do is edit the text on your website.

The second thing the search engines look at is how popular your site is on the internet.

• How many other sites are linking to you?
• Do you have important authority sites linking to you?
• What text do such sites use to link to your site?

These are called off-page elements and we will address them in the next post on this topic.

On-page elements are important in determining your rankings but off-page elements are even more important. You’re unlikely to get to the #1 spot in Google, MSN or Yahoo purely because of your on-page elements, but they could mean the difference between being on page 3 or page 1 – So be sure to read Lesson 2 in this series for some off-page tips.

Here are a few critical on-page elements that you need to optimize in order to get reasonable organic listings for your keyword phrases.

Ensure that your <title> tags include the keyword phrase that you are optimizing for.

<title></title> tags indicate the title of your web page and gives the search engines a strong clue as to what a specific web page is about. This text appears on the very top of your browser window when you are on a given web page and this very same text is what the search engines will display in their organic listings as the clickable text link to your site. So, it’s really important that your <title> tags contain the keywords that you’re optimizing that particular page for.

For example:

If you wrote an article about how to read text faster, then the title of the page could be:

How to read text faster | Read Text Faster.

notice that I used the separator ‘|’ to boost the importance of my keywords for this page: this is an easy and natural way of doing it. You can use another separator if you wish, the idea is to present your keywords clearly for both users and search engine consumption.

Ensure that your <h1> tags include the keyword phrase that you are optimizing for.

Search engines read H1 tags first to find out what your page is about like headlines in a newspaper. If the search engine spiders discover your most important keywords in your <h1> tags, your page will be seen as more relevant for that search term and you will rank higher.

In your first 50 words of text be sure to include your keyword phrase.

Many search engines pay more attention to the first 50 words on a page than to the rest of the content on that page so be sure to include your keywords at least once within the first 50 words for each page you publish.

Keyword density: at least once in every 100 words of text on your page, incorporate your keywords and keyword phrases.

Your keywords need to appear a few times on your page integrated into the text but not more than 4 times for every 100 words. This is also known as 4% keyword density. If you go any higher than 4%, your site may be penalized for using a spam tactic.

Your internal site links need to include your keywords.

Search engines use the words in your link text (otherwise known as “anchor text”) to estimate the nature of the page you’re linking to. This can be used to your advantage in your on-page SEO efforts, giving your pages a little boost for your keywords.

We have many Clients who struggle to rank well in the search engines until they understand the importance of this tactic. Prior to working with us, they insisted on having a link on their site called ‘Home’. These people are actually optimizing their home page for the word “home” when they should be optimizing it for their main keyword instead! If they were to change the text “home” to “Read Faster Home”, or “Improve Reading Comprehension home”, they would give themselves a boost for “read faster” or “improve comprehension”. If your keyword for a page is “optimize your website”, then link to it from your menu using the text “optimize your website”, or “How to optimize your website”.

The same goes for all pages on your site. Don’t ever link to a page on your site using “Click here” unless you’d like to rank well for the phrase “click here”.

Original content means that visitors will spend more time on your site.

The search engines don’t want to display twenty sites with the same content. It doesn’t provide a good experience for their users. So you’ll find that many search engines have implemented “duplicate content penalties” for sites that seem to be displaying content very similar to content found on other website(s).

So what do you do if your content is the same as someone else’s?

This happens quite often, particularly if you’re using content from private label rights (PLR) articles, where hundreds of other people might be doing the same thing. The trick is to reword the article to make it unique. Shuffle the paragraphs, use synonyms, and try to change the article by at least 50%, and preferably more to be on the safe side.

Get the best quality content that you can for your site, because the search engines will also pay attention to how long people spend reading your pages. The longer visitors stay on your pages, the more relevant your site appears to the search engines for the keywords you have optimzed the page for. If visitors leave your site within a few seconds, the search engines may interpret this action as a poor fit for your keyword phrases. So try to write text that your visitors would be interested in and thus, try to increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site.

Mantra Mantra Mantra

I just asked the key managers employed by my latest Client to tell me what exactly it was that their company did – the response was so shockingly bland that I decided to escalate my curiosity on a more personal level. I asked the same folks to tell me what they do at the company – After an hour I was speechless. You see, a few months ago this company hired a consultant for $20,000 to help them bond as a team and then use the synergy of the moment to draft and approve a new mission statement that would help propel them forward, somehow… magically. The statements I listened to lacked purpose, focus and cohesiveness among other things. To put it bluntly, several managers were fighting with their counterparts in other divisions – Sales was determined to place some form of blame on Engineering and Engineering had it out of the folks in Finance. This is not healthy – nor is it productive so when the CEO asked for my help I wanted to be sure that I understood what I was getting into. I’d been tasked with making a positive change in the work environment so that the team could identify and then achieve common goals yet the issue seemed to stem from something much more basic and a lot less complex.

In many ways this situation reminds me of companies that hire a consultant to conduct a two day ‘broaden your horizons’ type of company event away from the office with team building exercises leading up to a brainstorming session designed to create a mission statement, a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) or something in between. The event usually goes like this:

Day 1: A day of exercises, games and puzzles designed to improve relationships within the company and encourage trust among colleagues. One such activity includes turning your back on the group, closing your eyes and then falling backwards hopefully into the arms of your co-workers. Another one involves sticks and ropes to encourage the team to work together to achieve a common goal.

Day 2: Usually the rain day plan (an indoor activity) where the entire group assembles to create a mission statement. The room is usually too small to contain the entire team and there are pens, paper, white boards and usually a facilitator who knows nothing about your business. Everyone in a managerial position and above in the company is present and encouraged to contribute. After several hours you typically get something like:

‘The mission of Moevenpick is to deliver superior quality products and services for our customers and communities through leadership, innovation, and partnerships.’

Don’t get me wrong. I love Moevenpick, but I’ve never thought I was participating in ‘leadership, innovation, and partnerships’ when I ordered an ice cream there. The basic reason for mission statementosis is that people contributing to a company’s direction usually worked for McMinsey or Boston Consulting Group, have a MBA or some combination of all three.

These days, it is probably more helpful to have a mantra than a mission statement. A mantra contains 6 words max (the fewer the better) and if your receptionist is able to retain it for more than a day, you probably have something interesting.
A few examples:

• Domino’s Pizza “You got 30 minutes”
• YouTube “Broadcast Yourself”
• UPS “What can brown do for you?”
• McDonald’s “i’m lovin’ it”
• PHILIPS “sense and simplicity”
• M&Ms “melts in your mouth, not in your hand”
• Red Bull “Gives you wings”
• INTEL “Leap Ahead”

So, although you may have wanted to hire that consultant for $20,000 to help build some team spirit and get everyone to pitch in and create a mission statement – think instead about taking a weekend off to relax – do something you really enjoy and then on Monday, dedicate time to creating a memorable mantra for your company. If you still want to outsource this to some creative types, get in touch, we may be able to help.

As for my Client, we were able to identify the issue within two days. Our team addressed the major concerns in a consultative session called Potential Problem Analysis and created viable solutions within one day. We were then hired to implement 2 of the 6 solutions and project manage the remaining 4. The solution that seemed to make the most difference at the end of the day was the mantra. I still can’t believe it – the mantra was missing and when it was selected and put in place, 20 very different managers walked back into their arenas to fight the competition instead of each other. This case was fun, rewarding and delivered with excellent results. Does your company have a mantra yet? Tell us about it.

What’s a Website For?

A business purposed website exists to either
(a) sell something to a potential Customer or
(b) sign them up for a newsletter.

IT REALLY IS THAT SIMPLE.

If the site does not help visitors accomplish at least one of those two things, then the site provides very little benefit to the business.

That’s basically all there is to it.
Buy, join, or leave.

There is no other option.

With that in mind, do you already distribute an industry newsletter that your potential Customers might value?

If not, this would be a very good first step in the right direction.
Always remember to use benefit’s based selling methods, track those downloads, keep good clean statistics and test what works best for your business every chance you get.

Folks, if your goal is to make more money online, then do something about it and sign up for our Newsletter right now. BoxOnline is a team of professional, business process consultants dedicated to helping people like you sell more, earn more and basically get the results that you desire.

Business Case Basics 101

The most obvious reason for putting together a business case is to justify the resources and capital investment necessary to bring a change project to fruition. This may imply that a business case is simply a financial document but please don’t be mislead – business cases need to include financial justification but more importantly, they need to link all of the relevant facts in a cohesive story outlining the what, when, where, how and why for investing resources into a project. The purpose of a business case is to capture the reasoning for initiating a project or task. It is often presented in a well-structured, written document but may also come in the form of verbal argumentation. The logic of the business case is that when resources such as money or effort are consumed; they should support the business. Upgrading a given piece of kit (hardware, software etc) to improve system performance is a good example because the “business case” is that better performance would improve customer satisfaction.

Essential elements of a business case include:

• Reasons why the project is necessary.
• How the project or results generated by the project will solve given issues or capitalize on specific opportunities facing the organization.
• Focus: Exactly what ‘problem’ or ‘issue’ does the project address or solve?
• What is/are the recommended solution(s)?
• What are the benefits to the business?
• What will happen to the business if the project is not undertaken?
• Timing: When will the solutions be deployed?
• Resources such as money, people, and time needed to deliver the solution and realize the benefits?

The Business Case Process should ensure that:

• The required issues and concerns have been thoroughly considered and documented
• Both the value and risks inherent in the proposed project are clear
• The project is sponsored by, and has the commitment of an executive with the capability and authority to deliver the benefits
• The delivery of the outcomes and benefits can be tracked and measured.

Your Business Case should contain some or all of the following information types (depending on the size, timing, scale and availability of information):

• Reference; project name/reference, origins/background/current state
• Context; business objectives/opportunities, business strategic alignment (priority)
• Value Proposition; desired business outcome(s), outcome roadmap, business benefits (by outcome), quantified benefits value, costs/ROI financial scenarios, risks/costs of not proceeding, project risks (to project, benefits and business)
• Focus; problem/solution scope, assumptions/constraints, options identified/evaluated, size, scale and complexity assessment
• Deliverables; outcomes, deliverables and benefits planned, organizational areas impacted (internally and externally), key stakeholders, dependencies
• Workload; approach, phase/stage definitions (project (change) activities, technical delivery activities, workload estimate/breakdown, project plan and schedule, critical path)
• Required resources; project leadership team, project governance team, team resources, funding
• Commitments (required); project controls, reporting processes, deliverables schedule, financial budget/schedule

While one of your primary goals may be to get funding, your chances of success will be greater if you keep the following goals in mind as well:

• Make it interesting; remember someone will need to read it.
• Keep it clear and concise.
• Minimize jargon and conjecture.
• Provide the reader with a clear vision of the end state.
• Communicate all facts as part of the overall story – if you’ve done your homework, here is the chance to prove it.
• Demonstrate the value the project brings to the organization, Customer(s) and financial bottom line of the company.

After preparing your business case you and your team will likely experience some positive side effects including:

• CLARITY: Organization of thoughts, activities and knowledge
• REALITY CHECK: An objective review of the ideas and facts related to the project
• STRENGTH: The ability to identify holes, inconsistencies or weaknesses in the effort
• ELEVATOR PITCH: An improved ability to communicate the purpose of the project
• ROI: Financial justification for the effort

Below we offer an outline that includes many of the above recommendations. Remember that your business case should describe to the reader the problem or opportunity that exists. Then, the business case should describe how the problem will be solved or the opportunity exploited. The outline presented below shows you how to effectively tell the entire story of your project and concludes by demonstrating the expected ROI and financial impact you expect to achieve.

Executive summary:
Pretend that you have two minutes to tell someone about the project and justify your requests for resources and funding.

Each paragraph in the executive summary should succinctly convey vital information about the project, and communicate the story to the reader. The information in each section of the executive summary is typically extracted from the detailed sections of the business case. We recommend creating the executive summary after you have completed the rest of the sections.

Current state assessment and problem statement:
The situational assessment or current state assessment refers to the details regarding the problem or opportunities facing the organization. It is a statement about what is happening in the organization today. Most projects are started by the original project stakeholder or champion because something is wrong, or a major opportunity is being missed. Every project usually has one or two key themes related to issues or opportunities. In one paragraph or less, clearly state the specific business problem.

Project Overview:
The project description section introduces your reader to the details of the project. This section should give your stakeholders confidence that your team will professionally, efficiently and aggressively seek the best processes, systems, and organizational elements to enable your company to overcome the issues presented above. There are two main components of the project overview section:

• description and scope
• objectives

Use a maximum of nine bullet points to state what the proposed solution is expected to accomplish. Some examples may include purchasing hardware and software or selecting a new vendor.

Solution Overview:
Summarize the solution that your team recommends to address the issues and opportunities presented in the current state assessment. Be sure to cover the following topics:

• Current Process and ‘fit’ into the big picture
• Requirements
• Alternatives
• Compare Alternatives
• Additional Considerations
• Action Plan

Current process: Identify the organizational processes that the proposed solution will likely affect, including the departments within your organization, relationships with Clients, external partners, and the competition.

Requirements: List the resources needed to complete the project, such as staff, hardware, software, print materials, time, budget, and so forth.

Alternatives. Outline at least three other options to implementing the proposed solution. Be sure to include basic requirements and an estimation of project risks for each, ramp-up time, training costs, and potential project delays.

Compare alternatives. Compare and contrast each of the alternatives with the proposed solution and the other alternatives. State similarities and differences, benefits and detriments, and costs associated with each option. Basically, answer the question: “What is the cost to get to the future state, and is it worth it?”

Additional considerations. List critical success factors other than ROI metrics; for example, affects on partnership agreements with specific vendors or the potential need for help desk or Customer support.

Action plan. Now that management understands the solution and the financial return that will be realized from implementing the solution, they will want confirmation that the solution can actually be implemented. Propose specific action steps. State your short-term (first three months) and long-term (three months to conclusion) action plans, including major milestones. This section will reassure management that your team has carefully and professionally considered all major issues of the implementation. A number of major elements are important to successful implementation. Your implementation section should address each area.

• Implementation components
• Implementation timeline
• Major milestones
• Major dependencies

Critical assumptions and risk assessment:
Most business improvement projects will make assumptions in order to develop the solution. It is vital that the business case documents these assumptions. You should test your assumptions with project stakeholders and operational managers prior to placing them in the business case. The statement of assumptions should be followed by an impartial discussion of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) that are associated with the recommended solution. It is also important that the business case discuss the risks associated with both implementing and not implementing a solution, the seriousness of the apparent risk should it occur and the probability of the risk occurring.

Conclusions and recommendations:
This section closes out the business case. It should reiterate the key themes that caused the project to be undertaken. It should restate the solution in at a high-level. It should identify the return on investment and the overall benefits of the solution. It should restate the risks of doing nothing and re-convey a sense of urgency. Finally this section should state the conclusions the reader should draw from the business case, and your recommendations for next steps.

The Right Clients

Someone recently asked me why I chose to capitalize the words ‘Client’ and ‘Customer’ in my texts. Well, the simple explanation is that I appreciate their business. As a sign of respect and acknowledgement of their importance to my company, I want to show my appreciation in every article that I write containing these words.

It’s wonderful to have successful, paying Clients but even better to do business with the right Clients. To start with, we are either big fans of our Clients or we become big fans as we get to know them better. I hear our employees and freelancers raving every week about some of the great things our Clients are doing to grow their businesses. I want to maintain this positive culture and have therefore decided that our sales teams will only target companies that we really want to do business with. I want to be selective with the people that we do business with so that the result is and continues to be a positive experience for all involved.

Today we have four business relationship guidelines that steer our Client acquisition decisions:
1. Essential elements of our Client’s business culture MUST match ours or at the very least, are similar to those that we value and respect on both an ethical and moral basis. We take pride in our reputation and credibility and wish to work with those with similar ideals.

2. The potential for success is reasonable to fantastic. We want to ensure that we have the necessary competencies and availability to deliver the project successfully and exceed our Client’s expectations. Should a prospect have what we determine to be unrealistic goals, we will gladly recommend a competitor. We will never try to convince a Client that an apple is an orange or that we can deliver something that we know we are not capable of delivering because we want to help each of our Clients solve their problem(s) and, as a consequence, recommend our services to others.

3. Profit = Fun. It is a simple equation and there is a ton of truth behind it. A project must be profitable and have the potential to be carried through to successful completion with high levels of motivation and contributions to our bottom line. In essence, we ask for a win-win deal. If our Client wins, we win as well and if our Client is not able to achieve their objectives, we reconsider our role and our efforts to provide the necessary ingredients for success. Competing on price has little merit in this equation since the team requires rewards for a job well done.

4. Bandwidth is an annoying topic for us because our product is based on people with specific skills and limited availability. We want to give our Client’s the best possible service and that means that we need to have a well rested, physically and mentally fit team ready to jump into action. Success brings with it some level of frustration as you learn that you simply can not please everyone all the time. Our people tend to be booked solid for 60 to 90 days out and that means that there is little available bandwidth to acquire new business unless we add additional people to the team. On some occasions this is exactly what we did because we were interviewing superb people at the same time as we acquired a new Client that required the type of services that these new people were capable of delivering. That was a lucky situation and in 10 years has only occurred twice. Most of the time, we are approached by prospects that were referred to us by Clients or read about a Client success story that we created. These prospects usually have some urgent needs and therein lies our challenge. We want to help such companies but only if we can put the right team together to increase the probability of success.

Naturally, there are exceptions to the above guidelines but truth be told, we learned our lessons in the past and such exceptions are rarely worth the time and effort when a win-win is simply not possible.

We count on people like you to understand our thought process and although it may seem in some ways to be rather exclusive given the way that we filter our opportunities, please know that we really appreciate new business opportunities, they are the lifeblood of our business model. BoxONline is currently undergoing some growing pains and thus further expansion is necessary to achieve our objectives so, if you know of people who may fit into and support this Client oriented model of exceeding expectations, please do get in touch with me directly using this form.

Protect Your Plan

In most businesses there is a plan to follow. In many businesses however, a plan needs to be created, agreed upon by the decision makers and then applied to the business.

When you establish a plan of action chances are that you want your plan to succeed. We help our Clients with a process known as PPA to protect their plan and ensure that it has an above average chance for success. If this is what you want then it is essential to identify, evaluate and understand the risks that could possibly undermine your plan and prepare (in advance) to face each obstacle with preventative and contingent actions.

Think of it this way, “protecting the plan” has to do with a set of processes that help you to prepare for risks and avoid surprises that could sabotage your project. Here is how to get started:

a) Identify Potential Problems that could sabotage your project
b) Identify the Triggers that will inform you when such a problem has occurred
c) List Likely Causes for each potential problem
d) Create Preventative & Contingent Actions

You can plan and take preventative actions to reduce the likely causes for each potential problem and plan contingent actions to minimize the likely effects of each potential problem if and when they occur.

If you have an important plan that needs to succeed and you’d like some help protecting your plan – don’t hesitate, contact us today.

Compensation

This is always an area of discussion for my Clients. Rather than publish a list of current rates in several different countries and attempt to keep such a list up-to-date, I prefer to use a USD model which you can adapt to your particular situation and geography. The following are simply guidelines that we use in corporate restructuring projects. You may or may not agree with some of the line items but on the whole, the following has been helpful to many of us.

Title	Cash Range	Average	Bonus	% Equity	Equity Median
CEO Founder	100k-250k	200k	0-100k	5-20%	9.0%
CEO Non-Founder	180k-260k	225k	0-150k	3-7%	5.0%
President / COO Founder	100k-200k	175k	0-50k	3-8%	5.0%
President / COO Non-Founder	150k-230k	200k	0-75k	1-3%	1.5%
CFO Founder	100k-170k	150k	0-20k	1-5%	2.5%
CFO Non-Founder	100k-200k	160k	0-50k	0.5-1.5%	1.0%
CTO Founder	120k-200k	160k	0-30k	2-10%	4.0%
CTO Non-Founder	125k-200k	160k	0-50k	0.5-2%	1.0%
VP Engineering Founder	150k-185k	160k	0-30k	1.5-5%	2.5%
VP Engineering Non-Founder	150k-200k	175k	0-50k	0.7-1.5%	1.0%
VP Sales Founder	175k-200k	175k	0-60k	1.2-5%	3.5%
VP Sales Non-Founder	160k-200k	175k	20-150k	0.7-1.3%	1.0%
VP Business Dev Founder	150k-180k	170k	0-35k	1.5-5%	3.0%
VP Business Development Non-Founder	150k-190k	175k	0-70k	0.5-1.3%	0.75%
VP Marketing Founder	140k-180k	160k	0-30k	1.3-7%	3.0%
VP Marketing Non-Founder	160k-190k	175k	0-50k	0.5-1.2%	0.8%

Is Math Cool?

My father used to tell me that hard work and knowledge were the keys to success and furthermore, one needed to deliver 100% if you wished to succeed in anything. I asked him if math was an important factor in the equation and he confirmed that without math we would not have progressed very far on the evolutionary scale. So, I did a little research and discovered that from a strictly mathematical viewpoint one can not only avoid hard work but also achieve more than 100% and my mathematical proof goes like this:

What is 100% comprised of? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%?
Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%?
We’ve all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%.
How about achieving 103%?

Here’s a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z were represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Then:

H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K = 8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%
and
K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E = 11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But,

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E = 1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%
and,
B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T = 2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

Astonishing to me but obviously not to those ‘in the know’:

A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G = 1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118%

So, one can then conclude with mathematical certainty that: while Hard Work and Knowledge will
get you close, Attitude delivers the goods and both Bullshit and Ass Kissing will put you over the top!

Needless to say my father was not impressed and I got grounded for a week. If I remember correctly, my theorem put a smile on a few faces before the chalkboard got erased.

Radical Approach – Know thy Customer

One of my mentors told a Client (a manufacturer of drills) that

“People don‘t want your product.”

The president of this large manufacturing firm looked shocked but my mentor continued,

“Your Customers are not interested in drills with more bells and whistles.
They are in the business of making holes – and they want help with 2 things:

1) Making more holes in less time and
2) Making good quality holes

end of story.”

With these words of advice the manufacturer changed his entire marketing approach and for the following 5 years achieved sales records never seen in that industry before.

Think about it for a moment…
What do your Customers really want?
What specific benefit can you provide them with both today and in the future?
What are you waiting for?