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.

What Does Your Business Need Today?

Every business needs to succeed in at least 4 out of 6 core areas in order to survive
and all 6 areas if they want to prosper. These areas are:

• 1) Create products that Customers want to buy
• 2) Generate sustainable and healthy profit margins
• 3) Sell products / services profitably
• 4) Generate new sales leads
• 5) Convert prospects into Customers efficiently
• 6) Run a productive organization

We frequently coach our Clients to achieve success in each of these 6 main areas. If we could help you to improve any one of these categories – where would you want us to start?

Give us a call, let us know your thoughts.

How Fast Can You Achieve Results?

Success is about planning and process. Sure, there is more to it but it really boils down to knowing your goals and then planning the steps needed to achieve those goals

Did you know that 50% of a manager’s job is trying to figure out where the company is going in the next five years while the other 50% is supposed to be focused on execution. The latter seems to present a formidable challenge for most execs but the interesting thing is that know-how and technical proficiencies are not the major obstacles here.

Most managers today are burdened with issues such as a lack of time, insufficient planning, unclear communication, lack of accountability, no mentor or senior leadership to guide them, low commitment to getting a job done well, lack of determination, lack of passion for what they do, lack of focus and discipline etc. There you have it – the no holds barred – anything is possible – year 2000ish – next generation manager’s issues in one simple paragraph.

What to do… alas, what to do…

Here’s some food for thought:
1) Get organized and set some clearly defined goals for both yourself and your company.

2) Break those goals down into smaller and easier to achieve stages.

3) Create a vision of your best outcome scenario.

4) Be able to clearly communicate your outcome to others.

5) Write down a plan to accomplish the tasks involved with achieving success in each stage. Be sure to include milestones and metrics.

6) Be determined to focus the majority of your time and efforts on your goals.

7)  Remember to take a few days off each week to do other things and recharge your batteries.

8) Celebrate your success each time you achieve a milestone.

Want to take a shortcut to success?  Just drop us a line and let us know why we should help you. Five lucky winners will be chosen next month.

Brilliant Linguistics

I am going to dedicate this article to phrases, quotes and sayings that I come across during business discussions, coaching sessions and educational experiences as a living reference for things people say and write that are so incredibly effective… I could not improve on them if I wanted to.

The first one was uttered by an incredibly good salesperson who refused to pitch anything until he knew what the person he was communicating with wanted. This salesman used a brilliant, easy-going method to uncover his Customer’s desires, objectives, wants, needs etc. and then orient the pitch around helping the person (his Customer) achieve his goals. Among others, his trademark follow up was:

“What would you definitely buy from me today if only I were smart enough to offer it to you?”

If you are ever on the receiving end of this question, have your wallet ready because the psychology of the query is more powerful than most people realize. This is a killer line and there really is no escape from it once it has been thrown into the court.

Going in a completely different direction, here is a quote that is simply remarkable.

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists“

Each week we meet with senior executives with professor doctor titles running multinational corporations. Most are convinced that they did everything by the book and can not understand what is going wrong – why is their business not performing as expected?  Their concerns almost always deal with situations that were not described in reference books or textbooks in years past. While education is important, a continuous cycle of learning is even more important.  Today’s business managers need to equip themselves for an age where the only certain thing is uncertainty in a climate of constant change. You need to be a learning machine accepting that what you learned yesterday might not help you tomorrow. The quote above was written in the 1950s!

Push or Pull?

With SEO initiatives trying to wrestle with the ubiquity of search engine dominance in our daily quest for information… it turns out that if you really want to succeed in promoting and selling products online, you need both push and pull strategies in place before you launch.

OK, sure, social networking technologies have raised the bar even further so that pull strategies are no longer an option… they are a must have for online marketing success. So, let’s start with some brief definitions and then move into a few suggestions.

Marketing theory distinguishes between two main kinds of promotional strategy – “push” and “pull”.

Push marketing is where you develop advertising and promotional strategies geared toward your marketing and distribution channels to entice them into promoting your product. As consumers, we rarely see this type of marketing because it is directed to the importers and distributors. It might include wholesale discounts, kickbacks, bonuses, and other types of support. It’s all designed to have the retailer promote your product to the end users instead of promoting a different or competing product.

Pull marketing on the other hand is when you develop advertising and promotional strategies that are meant to entice the prospect to buy your product or service. Some classic examples are Sales Events such as “bring in this coupon to save 25%” or “buy two get one free” etc. With pull marketing, you are trying to create a sense of increased, time limited value so that the Customer will come into your store to buy something today. When companies encourage happy Customers to spread the word to their friends and families – that’s a type of pull marketing also known as referrals or word of mouth (WOM) marketing. When companies produce ads that are controversial, edgy or downright shocking, they create a ‘buzz’ – and that’s another type of pull marketing. The ad pulls prospects into the distribution channel and if done well – right into the retailer’s arms.

It can be inferred from the above descriptions that Push is generally used by larger organizations with minimal if any direct contact with consumers (thus B2B) and Pull is preferred by the retailer (B2C) who deals directly with consumers and needs more sales this week. As technology provides increased and direct access to the consumer – larger organizations are starting to see the light – they too want to own a piece of the consumer’s attention.

Until recently, TV was the medium of choice for launching pull campaigns but the costs are high and the metrics are delayed so success can only be measured months later – much too late to change tack. Most large firms lack experience in communicating with consumers online and given their sloth like execution speed, achieving success with cost effective pull strategies can quite a challenge.

Online, this is a different story as long as the pull strategy is process based, systematized and supported by a team of experienced online marketers. Yes… online, large firms can help foster communities, create buzz, influence the winds of change and even view the success metrics of a pull campaign in close to real time.

The questions are:
Are large firms ready for real-time interaction?
Are they able to read the metrics, see the wind changing and then tack in time to catch the next breeze?
or do they still wish to act like supertankers heading toward the same destination with no regard for wind and weather?

Let’s dig a bit deeper… before responding.

Push

A “push” promotional strategy makes use of a company’s sales force and trade promotion activities to create consumer demand for a product. Typically this involves a reasonable investment in materials to get things rolling and placed in the right hands for maximum effect along the chain of distribution. The producer’s cost for push campaigns is often complemented by wholesaler’s and retailer’s advertising campaigns that are used regularly to drive traffic and leads into their shops.

Following the distribution chain, the producer promotes the product to wholesalers, the wholesalers promote it to retailers, and the retailers promote it to consumers.

A good example of “push” selling is mobile phones, where the major handset manufacturers such as Sony Ericsson and Nokia promote their products via retailers such as Carphone Warehouse. Personal selling and trade promotions are often the most effective promotional tools for companies like these – for example offering subsidies on the handsets to encourage retailers to sell higher volumes.

A “push” strategy tries to sell directly to the consumer, bypassing other distribution channels. With this type of strategy, consumer promotions and advertising are the most likely promotional tools.

Pull

A “pull” selling strategy is one that requires high spending on advertising and consumer promotion to build up demand for a product.

If the strategy is successful, consumers will ask their retailers for the product, the retailers will ask the wholesalers, and the wholesalers will ask the producers.

A good example of an effective (but expensive) pull strategy is the intense advertising and promotion of fast food restaurants and also kiddie toys – mostly on TV. Fast food restaurants often use children’s toys as a hook in order to target the primary influencer (the child) and insert desire into this very vocal and assertive segment of the population. Parents find it very challenging to resist visiting the restaurant that their child talks (and often sings) about day after day and hour after hour.

Thus, in this example, the producer creates demand using a loss leader to lure their target into the retail shops. Ten years of research has revealed that the more memorable and emotional the promotion is – the better the ROI.

In the online world, there are many different ways to create demand including leveraging social networks, viral tactics, videos, mobile phones, software applications and utilities like Twitter and community forums. The online difference is that the internet is quite transparent to feedback (both positive and negative). Marketers need to be aware of and plan for damage control to minimize the impact that potentially disruptive individuals can have on their pull campaigns.

Sure, you can filter out negative comments and such but, with social networking… the consumer really has a voice in this medium and the marketer’s task is often to convert the negative input into something more neutral should it occur while driving more and more traffic toward the core promotional message and thus the distribution channel.

Over-delivering on promises and flooding the media with video testimonials has helped many of our Clients overcome undesirable input by drowning out the noise of negative feedback or converting it into something more positive and constructive.

The focus of an effective online pull promotion is to create consumer demand for a reasonable cost and have consumers pull the product into a given online or OFFLINE distribution channel.

With careful planning and best practices pull campaign success is easier to achieve today than ever before. Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in creating, launching or maintaining pull campaigns online. We have an entire library of process maps dedicated to serving our Clients with proven methods to achieve pull strategy success.

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.

email Policy

The Problem

E-mail typically takes too long to respond to which results in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.

Given that our Time and Attention (two of our most valuable assets) are finite, we strive to find a way of responding to email effectively while managing our projects and building success stories for our Clients.

One Interesting Solution

Treat all email responses as we would SMS text messages and use a fixed number of characters per response – instead of counting characters in our emails, we count sentences. In addition, we do not check email more than 4 times each day.

To increase productivity and deliver the results that our Clients expect from us, we now spend less time checking email and have adopted the policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less.

At BoxOnline, we believe that how you spend your time and attention says a lot about who you are.

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.

Is Identity Theft a Real Threat?

Friends, this article is serious. Based on a study conducted by Paypal in 2008, Internet users in the UK are much more likely to be victims of identity theft than their peers in both Europe and the USA.

The recent survey by PayPal and Ipsos Research of 6,000 online shoppers in 6 countries revealed that 14% of respondents in the UK admitted that they have had their identities stolen online. This can be compared with only 3% in Germany. More than half of respondents said that they used personal dates and names as passwords, making it relatively easy for hackers to gain access to accounts through manual efforts of trial and error. The French are particularly bold – two-thirds of the respondents claimed to use easily guessed passwords such as birthdays and telephone numbers but the icing on the cake was that over 80% of the French post this sort of personal data on social-networking sites. Unfortunately, the hackers enjoy trolling the very same social media sites too.

The article did not reveal how users could protect themselves so, in an effort to provide some form of public service… here are my recommendations:
1) Do NOT reveal detailed personal information on a public internet site such as myspace, facebook etc
2) If you have already ignored recommendation number one, check all of your passwords and ensure that they are at least 10 digits long and that they contain a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols such as # $ % ( ^ ) etc.
3) a strong password is something like RtY7f*e#2U and a weak password is something like 041277. To check the strength of your passwords, try using the Password Meter – you can even download it to increase your security based on what I am about to reveal to you in the next recommendation.
4) You may have already inadvertently downloaded some sort of spyware that is recording what you type and then transmitting the result to a hacker, a hacking community or an online thief. If you are running Microsoft windows without anti-virus or firewall protection, you might as well raise the white flag and surrender today. Even with both anti-virus software and a leading firewall installed, if you were teased into clicking on some sort of advertisement that downloads a file or more to your computer, chances are reasonable to good that your machine has been infected. One last comment on this topic before we move on – many people have a free version of an anti-virus software installed and they somehow manage to forget to update it regularly thus leaving their machine susceptible to attack. Solution… get a Macintosh and don’t click on links that promise ‘free porn’ or music downloads. For the paranoid among us, add anti-virus software to your Mac and then get back to work
5) Change your password regularly. Do not keep the same password for more than 60 days
6) Create a secure place to store all your passwords and keep them protected with encryption. Put them somewhere safe but easily accessible. My suggestion is to create a secure email account and use their document repository service to give you access from any location. Here is a leading secure email service that offers a free secure email address.
7) Review ALL of your passwords for online banking, email, secure web sites etc and change the password to something stronger today.

enough said, now let’s get back to our regularly scheduled broadcast ;-)