All For You by Brian Keith

I am transitioning to a sales position, and here are the top three things I have learned so far:

1. Know which hoop you are aiming for. I thought that making sales was my goal.

Nope, it is finding the right clients- companies who we can work with profitably for the long term. Finding the right clients means our staff is happier, we make more money, and the same for the client.

2. Separate results from effort. I am still working on this- but I am seeing (as so many people have said) that it doesn’t matter how hard you work, it matters what results you get. And most results come from a small part of your total effort.

Some people take that to mean that you should work every waking hour during the work week. Some take it to mean that you should figure out which specific part of your effort is creating the results, and then go do that, but not to the point that work is all you do.

3. Find great mentors. Ian, my mother, a co-workers former vendor, some of my mother’s friends, a former boss- I am starting to build a group of people who know something about this sales thing.

I learn a lot from each conversation with any of them, and it is usually something different from each person. When I hear the same thing from more than one, I know I better follow that advice.

How about you? What big lessons would you add to this list?

Ian discusses a master editorial calendar as a way to build community (referring to Rubel’s post). Before I walk the 30 feet to his office, I am hoping he will elaborate on how this can help our clients.

(Sure, bloggers love to know about what everyone is doing, but what about one of my clients? how can this help them?)

So Ian, tell me how momAgenda or ColdHeat can use this tech to build their businesses.

Sales is like basketball- it either goes in the fuckin’ hoop or it doesn’t.
-Hugh Macleod

Amen.

Found on an apartment door near christmas:

“We know how busy you are especially this time of year so let us treat you to a breakfast snack and beverage. Please make time to stop by and see your staff, friends and neighbors on Saturday December 23rd between 9am-Noon. We look forward to seeing you and have a safe and Happy Holiday.”

Is there a faster way to discredit yourself than to say you know someone is busy and then ask them to take time out of their day to talk with you?

Here is what I would have written:

“Dear residents, we know this is a busy time of year, so let us cook for you this Saturday. Come on by the office if you like between 9am and noon- we’ve prepared a healthy breakfast for you and your family and friends. Happy holidays!”

1. This recognizes that people are busy.
2. It provides real value
3. It will do better at engaging reciprocity because it does not say “Please make time.”

Oh, and everything you write is a sales letter.

I am looking at an application for employment at Burger King. It is as attractive as applying for a lease or a credit card. Why didn’t the designer make this form pretty and a joy to fill out?

Look at Burger King’s ads, and they put a lot of thought into being attractive at the right time. But when it comes to staffing, they fall short.

Go to the site, and you see pretty (but uncrawlable) flash, so when you search burger king jobs you don’t see the Burger King jobs page…

Everything you put out is a sales letter. Job applications, receipts, invoices, websites, sales letters… don’t stop using good marketing principles just because the item at hand isn’t directly selling your product.

Feedburner will now take your subscriptions- click on the orange RSS icon on the top of the right nav bar. It should give better stats than the usual WordPress RSS function. Of course, Google Analytics would be better…

Granted, I am only 3 minutes into using Highrise as a contact management tool, but this is so cool- it lets you tag people and companies.

So now the people who I met at last week’s geek dinner will be tagged with Seattle Geek Dinner, and whenever I want to find everyone I met there, it will be easy.

Thank you 37signals!

“Plaxo sucks” no longer applies- because after I made that statement here, a former employee blogged a response. Regardless of the quality of the product, any company that has a human reply to me makes me think they are doing something right. Here is my reply to Terry:
—–
Terry,
While I use google to make quick decisions about services, I always appreciate humans stepping in to help when I don’t have all the information.

I wonder what Plaxo is doing to fight the bad press in google that led to my dismissing the app. I write about how to fight bad press, and I would suggest that Plaxo work at getting a top ranking for the phrase Plaxo Sucks and other terms people like me use to find the downsides of a product.

A note here: Wendy sent me a Plaxo update, so I know she uses it, so I feel it is probably good. I googled Plaxo Sucks in order to hear the downsides. If what I read had seemed unsubstantial, then I would have probably tried it out.

Curious that a former Plaxo guy is the one monitoring buzz, and not someone at Plaxo. As you point out, those rankings and blog posts are very important.

Brian
—–

What I love about being alive right now:

I heard about Hugh having a Geek Dinner in seattle tonight. I told my housemate, who works for a tech company, and my boss may also come. We’ll all sit in a pub, eat and drink and share stories. I hope Hugh tells more stories about how he promotes Stormhoek wine, because he has done a great job of that. And maybe we’ll tell some war stories.

And you know what? This is not unusual, some flash of lightning in Seattle. These kinds of things happen all the time. When some blogger you like comes to town, why wouldn’t you have dinner with him and a bunch of other geeks?

I love seattle, I love the tech community, I love the connecting power of blogging.

(Oh, and I love Scribefire as well, because I am writing this from a Firefox plugin that drastically reduces the time required to make a post. open source happiness!)

Trying out Scribefire, a Firefox addon that lets me publish blog posts from my browser window, not having to log in to wordpress. Could save me a few minutes per day, and add a few posts per week. Let’s see how it works!

Powered by ScribeFire.

UPDATE: It automatically installed that last line, but I disabled it, so it should be fine now. Looks like it works fine!