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The 5 laws of entrepreneurs

October 21st, 2009

The term ‘entre­pre­neur’ is entic­ing and to many peo­ple implies, ‘doer of any­thing that makes money’ and in a large sense is a cor­rect impli­ca­tion. How­ever, what is often miss­ing from the gen­eral under­stand­ing of the term ‘entre­pre­neur’ is that each endeavor of an ‘entre­pre­neur’ requires con­tin­ual focus, noth­ing is ever truly on ‘auto-pilot’. I have seen too many entre­pre­neurs fail because they tried to be every­thing to every­one; they tried blog­ging, then on to mar­ket­ing, then on to affil­i­ate sales .… all within a few months!

To be a suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur, you have to apply laser focus to your ven­ture to get it off the ground, then you have to con­tin­u­ally apply over­sight to keep it in the air. As you progress and advance inen­tre­pre­neuri­al­ism you can explore out­sourc­ing and Vir­tual Assis­tant options to help you man­age but in the early-stages of a ven­ture, it is all about you and your per­sonal drive.

We could spend hours upon hours of our time and pages upon pages of text that all talk about the do’s & dont’s of entre­pre­neurs and mar­ket­ing. While all of that would be valu­able infor­ma­tion I think that being ‘straight and to the point’ is always an effec­tive mean of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In my own career I have come to find that if I adhere to the 5 laws of entre­pre­neurs I can assure my ven­ture the best pos­si­ble chance of success.

5 Laws of Entrepreneurs:

  • Law of Focus: In the early-stage devel­op­ment of your ven­ture, prod­uct or ser­vice you must remain focused and resist temp­ta­tions to become distracted.
    • Out­line spe­cific times dur­ing your day that you will ded­i­cate to work­ing on the ven­ture and noth­ing else.
    • Dur­ing the times you are work­ing with your ven­ture, turn off your phones, email, Twit­ter … etc. This is qual­ity time for you and your idea only.
  • Law of Goals: It is imper­a­tive that you doc­u­ment the goals and objec­tives of your ven­ture. You have to have some­thing to hold your­self account­able to.
    • If you do not have highly spe­cific goals and objec­tives you can eas­ily become dis­tracted and lose focus (a vio­la­tion of the first law!).
    • Hav­ing spe­cific goals allows you to mea­sure the pro­gres­sion of your ven­ture; with­out achiev­ing goals you have no way to deter­mine if your ven­ture is progressing.
  • Law of Moti­va­tion: In the early-stage of your ven­ture it is easy to stay moti­vated because of excite­ment and nov­elty. You must keep that enthu­si­asm because you can’t expect cus­tomers to be excited about your ven­ture if your not.
  • Law of Integrity: You must vow to never mis­rep­re­sent or over­state your venture’s value or ben­e­fit. Noth­ing will sink a ven­ture quicker than an over­state­ment or misrepresentation.
    • Do not ‘make’ your ven­ture fit into a mar­ket, find the mar­ket that fits your ven­ture by con­duct­ing focus groups and prod­uct research.
  • Law of Per­se­ver­ance: If suc­cess were easy then there wouldn’t be such a thing as fail­ure. Suc­cess is the 100th attempt of 99 failures.
    • You must com­mit to never giv­ing up on your ven­ture until you achieve your goals that you have out­lined. YOU CAN NEVER GIVE UP!

Being an entre­pre­neur is not easy, noth­ing worth hav­ing ever is. The dif­fer­ence between your venture’s suc­cess and being the next idea tossed to the way-side is you! You are the only respon­si­ble for your own suc­cess, so go make it hap­pen! Go be a success!

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The art of selling

October 2nd, 2009

Have you ever known or heard of some­one that could, ‘sell an ice cube to an Eskimo’? How are those peo­ple so suc­cess­ful at sell­ing? Did they just hap­pen to find the right prod­uct to pro­mote? Did they just hap­pen to find their ‘per­fect mar­ket’? Did they fig­ure out the best times to approach peo­ple? The answer is yes, yes, yes and then some; a great sales­per­son is a mix­ture of all of those things and a whole lot more.

Who can be a salesperson?

Any­one can sell some­thing; truly there are some who have attrib­utes that give them advan­tages over oth­ers but regard­less, any­one can sell some­thing. Peo­ple are more recep­tive and will­ing to hold audi­ence with peo­ple that carry them­selves well socially and who are phys­i­cally appeal­ing. Every­one has weak­nesses that would not favor the career of a sales­per­son but the truly suc­cess­ful sales­peo­ple are those who have iden­ti­fied their weak­nesses and found equi­table ways to mit­i­gate them.

Sell­ing 101

Would you be sur­prised if I told you that sell­ing your prod­uct to another per­son has very lit­tle to do with the prod­uct itself? It is very true; the art of sell­ing a prod­uct is actu­ally more about sell­ing the per­son that is sell­ing the prod­uct than the prod­uct itself.

Here is an exer­cise to demon­strate my point; pic­ture a white room with two tables in it to start with. On each table is a pack­age of laun­dry soap and behind each table is a per­son offer­ing to sell you the soap. The sales­per­son on the left is a middle-aged male that hasn’t shaved or bathed in a few days with exces­sively long fin­ger nails and is wear­ing worn out cloth­ing that looks like it should be thrown away. The sales­per­son on the right is a middle-aged male that is very well groomed with man­i­cured fin­ger­nails and is wear­ing a clean, freshly pressed suit and has used a mod­est amount of cologne.

Both sales­men are offer­ing the same prod­uct at the same price; who do you buy from?  Try the exer­cise with your eyes closed and thoughts cleared. I can’t speak for you but I can tell you that more than not, con­sumers would buy the soap from the well groomed salesman.

The art of sell­ing is all about rela­tion­ship sell­ing; if you can get the con­sumer to accept you as a per­son and make an emo­tional con­nec­tion with you then you will be able to sell them just about anything.

Ethics

Ethics essen­tially comes down to a sim­ple mantra, “don’t take advan­tage of peo­ple”. For exam­ple, a bank’s loan offi­cer shouldn’t approve a loan for some­one that they feel can’t afford it even though they meet the loan qual­i­fi­ca­tions. Once you estab­lish a con­nec­tion with the con­sumer you need to take great care not to abuse that con­nec­tion and not sell the con­sumer prod­ucts that you don’t believe in, wont ben­e­fit the con­sumer or has no real value to the con­sumer. If you do, the con­sumer will even­tu­ally real­ize they have been duped and will not only not buy from you again but will tell an aver­age of 2 – 3 peo­ple not to buy from you either.

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The basics of Neuro-linguistic Programming

September 29th, 2009

The basics of neuro-linguistic pro­gram­ming and how to incor­po­rate it into a mar­ket­ing strategy

Neuro-linguistic pro­gram­ming (NLP) can be defined as a sys­tem of com­mu­ni­ca­tion regard­ing rela­tional behav­ior pat­terns and the sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ences asso­ci­ated with them. There are meth­ods used by ther­a­pists based on NLP  which seeks to enlighten peo­ple in com­mu­ni­ca­tion and self-presence while attempt­ing to change pat­terns of men­tal and emo­tional behavior.

NLP is widely regarded as a sub­jec­tive sys­tem and lacks solid, sub­stan­tial evi­dence to speak to it’s reli­a­bil­ity and cred­i­bil­ity. How­ever, there is enough sug­ges­tive the­ory to enter­tain the sys­tem with some mea­sure of prac­ti­cal­ity. You’ll have to judge whether NLP tech­niques are valid and right for your mar­ket­ing strategy.

Basic NLP Techniques

Dif­fer­ent sources on NLP will describe these tech­niques in much larger detail but I’ll inten­tion­ally keep it short and simple.

Rap­port / Reflection

In it’s most sim­plest form is mim­ic­k­ing or copy­ing the phys­i­cal and vocal inflec­tions of some­one or some group (or the per­cep­tion of some­one or some group) in order to put your­self on the same level as that per­son or group so as to be accepted by and iden­ti­fied with. Some may describe this as, ‘blend­ing in’. When the Pres­i­dent of the United States goes to speak to work­ers on a dock he takes off his suit coat, rolls his cuff’s a bit, loses his neck tie, unbut­tons the col­lar but­ton on his shirt and makes more casual ges­tures and walk­ing strides. This is because he wants the work­ers to iden­tify with him; when a lis­tener iden­ti­fies with a speaker he or she is much more inclined to receive, recall and sup­port the mes­sage that the speaker is delivering.

Anchor­ing

Think of anchor­ing like con­di­tion­ing or train­ing. You have to teach your audi­ence what to respond to by asso­ci­at­ing action with rec­og­nized and dis­tin­guished cues. A very pop­u­lar blog­ger can get his read­ers to share/syndicate his or her blog posts (the action) by sim­ply post­ing the blog (the cue) because the blog­ger is very pop­u­lar (the anchoring/conditioning/training). The blog­ger estab­lishes him/herself as an expert author­ity and con­di­tions the audi­ence to rec­og­nize that the blog posts are author­i­ta­tive. When the blog­ger makes a new post, it trig­gers the audi­ence to read/share it because the audi­ence per­ceives it to be authoritative.

Swish

This tech­nique allows for fast, re-directed think­ing and in NLP is used to divert focus from unwanted thoughts/behavior to more desired thoughts/behavior by attempt­ing to dis­rupt the pat­tern of behav­ior that leads to the unwanted thoughts or behav­ior. The Swish starts by visu­al­iz­ing the trig­ger that starts the pat­tern of unwanted behav­ior and then switched sev­eral times with visu­al­iza­tions of more desired thoughts or behavior.

Refram­ing

Not unlike Anchor­ing, refram­ing deals with stim­uli and asso­ci­ated action. In con­trast to anchor­ing how­ever, refram­ing attempts to alter the action asso­ci­ated to the stim­uli by chang­ing the per­cep­tion of the stim­uli. By chang­ing the way some­one thinks about or sees some­thing you can poten­tially alter the way they react to it. I know that cig­a­rettes are bad for me but when I see happy peo­ple hav­ing a good time with friends while hav­ing a cig­a­rette in their hand, I may per­ceive that cig­a­rettes aren’t as bad as I once thought because happy and good thoughts have been asso­ci­ated with cig­a­rettes. Cig­a­rettes may not be the great­est exam­ple because so much neg­a­tiv­ity sur­rounds them that I don’t think any amount of refram­ing could offset.

Proven or not, these tech­niques are already in play in many dif­fer­ent busi­nesses for many dif­fer­ent uses, regard­less if you label them NLP or not.

I feel that a suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing strat­egy can greatly ben­e­fit from the strate­gist being well versed in con­tem­po­rary under­stand­ings of the human mind.  If one can bet­ter under­stand how we think then he/she can bet­ter serve us on a deeper more sat­is­fy­ing level.

The Code­Tree rec­om­mends iCon­tact for mar­ket­ing list management

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The real prob­lem with MLM and net­work marketing

September 28th, 2009

It always sur­prises me the diverse opin­ions of MLM and net­work mar­ket­ing. Some are very involved with it and treat it very seri­ously; it has even attracted celebri­ties authors like Robert Kiyosaki and Robert Allen who pro­mote it. How­ever, there is still a major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion that would con­sider you to be a char­la­tan ped­al­ing snake oil after know­ing that you are involved with MLM or net­work marketing.

Why is there a prob­lem with MLM and Net­work Marketing?

Is it that the struc­ture takes the form of a pyra­mid? That is just a tiered incen­tives and a lot of large com­pa­nies use tiered incen­tives for their sales force. The entry sales per­son gets a per­cent­age of what he or she sells and then that per­sons man­ager or boss gets addi­tional incen­tives based on the per­for­mance of the sales peo­ple they are respon­si­ble for. Could it be because there is typ­i­cally a cost of entry to become a mem­ber of an MLM or net­work mar­ket­ing group? The, ‘pay to play’ par­a­digm doesn’t apply to just MLM or net­work mar­ket­ing, it’s the stan­dard fran­chis­ing model that count­less fran­chise busi­nesses use. Do you think that the local instal­la­tion of your favorite burger chain was a gift to the owner by the burger chain’s cor­po­rate office? No, the owner of the burger chain bought into the fran­chise, he or she ‘paid to play’.  MLM and net­work­ing mar­ket­ing are really no dif­fer­ent in that respect.

There are prob­a­bly as many ille­gal net­work mar­ket­ing or MLM scams out there as there are blades of grass; where the money gen­er­ated is from sell­ing other peo­ple the busi­ness oppor­tu­nity, to sell the busi­ness oppor­tu­nity and no real mer­chan­dise or prod­uct is sold. Those sys­tems are no more dif­fer­ent than the famous, “mail a dol­lar to eight peo­ple on the list” scam. There are how­ever, many busi­nesses that have suc­cess­fully estab­lished them­selves as a net­work mar­ket­ing or MLM com­pany and have sold tan­gi­ble prod­ucts to con­sumers (that are just cus­tomers and not resellers of the busi­ness oppor­tu­nity) all over the global; com­pa­nies like Amway, Excel and Meleleuca to name a few. To hold these com­pa­nies with the like­ness of an obvi­ous scam is a bit unrealistic.

Are a cou­ple of well-known pyra­mid schemes enough to ‘poi­son the apple’ and give all net­work mar­keters a bad name?

I think that the real prob­lem with the busi­ness of net­work mar­ket­ing and MLM isn’t the busi­ness itself, after all it is just sim­ply a busi­ness model; the real prob­lem lies with some of the indi­vid­u­als that it attracts. The busi­ness itself is ideal for many rea­sons such as a low start-up costs, low over­head and the poten­tial to make a lot of money.

Unfor­tu­nately, the strengths of net­work mar­ket­ing and MLM are also it’s weak­nesses. Since net­work mar­ket­ing is eas­ily adopted, it can be and is adopted by those who may not nec­es­sar­ily be qual­i­fied to own their own busi­ness (which is what true MLM or net­work mar­ket­ing is, busi­ness own­er­ship). Net­work mar­ket­ing and MLM will inevitably attract (in addi­tion to qual­i­fied indi­vid­u­als) peo­ple who; haven’t done well in their cur­rent busi­ness or pro­fes­sion, have no expe­ri­ence with busi­ness own­er­ship and most impor­tantly have an unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tion of the work effort involved in rela­tion to the income achieved by the work effort.

There isn’t any­thing  nec­es­sar­ily wrong with those char­ac­ter­is­tics; even some of the most suc­cess­ful net­work mar­keters entered into the indus­try with some of those very same char­ac­ter­is­tics. I’m only say­ing that is describes the lion’s share of net­work mar­keters and that very few of them (if any) do some­thing about it. Many peo­ple in the busi­ness will end up over-selling their oppor­tu­nity, come across as des­per­ate, dis­cuss their oppor­tu­nity in social sit­u­a­tions when it isn’t appro­pri­ate or even worse; know­ingly describe their oppor­tu­nity inac­cu­rately. The lat­ter of which is largely respon­si­ble for the neg­a­tive dis­dain that most peo­ple have when think­ing about MLM and net­work marketing.

How do we fix this?

The solu­tion lies in per­cep­tion. We have to fun­da­men­tally change the way we view net­work mar­ket­ing and MLM by rec­og­niz­ing it for what it is. Net­work mar­ket­ing and MLM are a busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties and the prac­ti­tion­ers of are very much, inde­pen­dent busi­ness own­ers. Some fledg­ling mar­keters aren’t pre­pared to be respon­si­ble  for the com­plete suc­cess or fail­ure of an endeavor but that is what busi­ness own­er­ship is all about. By tak­ing net­work mar­ket­ing and MLM more seri­ous and treat­ing it more like a tra­di­tional busi­ness those on the out­side look­ing in will start to adopt the idea of net­work mar­ket­ing and MLM more readily.

The Code­Tree rec­om­mends iCon­tact for mar­ket­ing list management

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