What Every Good Marketer Knows from Seth Godin -Good Marketing checklist..

• Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
  
• Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
  
• Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
  
• Share of wallet is easier, more profitable and ultimately more effective a measure than share of market.
  
• Marketing begins before the product is created.
  
• Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.
  
• Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.
  
• Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not.
  
• Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
  
• Products that are remarkable get talked about.
  
• Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.
  
• You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.
  
• If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.
  
• People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
  
• You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
  
• What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.
  
• Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.
  
• Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs) are quickly proving how well they work.
  
• People all over the world, and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.
  
• Good marketers tell a story.
• People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
  
• Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.
  
• Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to.
  
• Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.
  
• A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.
  
• Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in an conversation-rich world.
  
• Marketers are responsible for the side effects their products cause.
  
• Reminding the consumer of a story they know and trust is a powerful shortcut.
  
• Good marketers measure.
  
• Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.
  
• One disappointed customer is worth ten delighted ones.

Obviously, knowing what to do is very, very different than actually doing it.

How Bill Gates works

If you look at his office, there isn't much paper in it. On his desk he has three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. He can drag items from one screen to the next.

Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.

The screen on the left has his list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail he is reading and responding to. And browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives him the ability to glance and see what new has come in while he is working on something, and to bring up a link that's related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of him.

Blueprint to a Billion -- There are seven traits common among firms that go from zero to a billion -- based on the book by David Thomson.

Summarized the seven traits below under DETAILS.

$50 million is an inflection point -- Thomson found that these firms grew exponentially after crossing the $50 million threshold, reaching a billion within four to twelve years. That's why it's critical to get across the $5 million chasm and then the $25 million chasm.

1)Create and sustain a breakthrough value proposition – Identify 10-30 times advantage over your competitors.Focus on a promise that "only you" can deliver by finding an underlying 10 to 30 times advantage over your competitors.

2)Exploit a high growth market -- the key is picking a rapidly expanding market (Sandbox). You actually need to do this first before figuring out a breakthrough proposition.

3)Focus relentlessly on cash flow -- Continually improving your Cash Conversion Cycle

4)Leverage big-brother alliances -- think Microsoft's early alliance with IBM. Find a couple big players in your industry that can "walk you around" the rest of the industry.

5)Pack board with industry experts -- attract big named experts to sit on your advisory board.

6)Marquee customers to build credibility -- in the same vein as leveraging big-brother alliances.

7)Inside-outside leadership team -- if you weren't lucky enough to start the business with this kind of partnership, you need to find that key #2. Key lesson? Look for someone you've know for awhile -- a customer, school or childhood friend, family member, consultant you've gotten to know, supplier, industry expert -- and if you don't know them well, test drive them first by working on some projects together.

Best Sales Tips

1. Ask 15 times : Most inexperienced sales people give up after 1 or 2 approaches. Most experienced sales people after 5. If within your sales process you can create the opportunity to “ask for the sale” 15 times, you’ll have a close ratio of 90%.
   
2. Sales Happen before 10am – The early bird does catch the worm.And your best customers are going to be those that are up working early themselves
   
3. Meet Daily to Drive Sales :Sam Palmisano became the latest CEO of IBM because he turned around IBM’s Global Services. And his key - holding a daily global sales call and working a list of 100 top prospects. Anything less than daily and you’re leaving business on the table. Dig into why specific sales are stalled each day or whom your sales team is trying to reach that day (not just going over numbers) and you’ll accelerate your sales, period.
   
4. Meet Weekly to Drive Marketing : this from the great marketer, Regis McKenna (Intel, Apple, Genentech). -Regis simply said “one hour per week.” In essence, get the right team in a room for one hour each week and ask the question “how do we reach more prospects with our message?” Brainstorm and act on some idea each week and you’ll drive marketing. Regis’s other key is to identify the “influencers” in your market and nurture relationships with them. Is there a key industry association executive? Is there a potential customer that is also the member president of your key industry association? Is there an important media personality? Is there a key lead supplier that can reference you?
   

That's all for today..

Competitive advantage

I read this week Jaynie L. Smith book "creating competitive advantage" .. Let me share you some key insights from this book.

Jaynie L. Smith asks, "Why should anyone do business with you, and not your competitor?"

Whether you are a retailer, manufacturer, distributor, or service provider, if you cannot answer this question, you are losing customers, clients and market share.

Smith say scores of companies substantially increased their sales by focusing on their competitive advantages.

What’s the number-one attribute Warren Buffet looks for in a company? "Sustainable competitive advantage," he told an interviewer. If Buffet examined your company, would he find what he’s looking for?

For her book, Smith interviewed the CEO of Jet Blue, David Neeleman who holds a weekly conference call with key executives in which he always asks:

What do we do better than the competition?
What do they do better than us?
How do we do more of that?

He asks these questions once a week.

Smith once worked with a financial advisory firm that decided to delve into this area. Before the in-house drill down, the team reported that its competitive advantages were:

Good reputation
Professional staff
Strong team and leader
Knowledgeable
Strong client relationships
Flexible

As Smith says, "Blah, blah, blah."

After the drill down, the group defined its competitive advantage this way:

Ranked in top 10 percent of money managers who beat S&P nationally
Fastest-growing Fidelity money manager in ’95, ’96, ‘97
Only firm ever featured by Fidelity in its advisory newsletter

For an interior designer, the competitive advantages were ultimately defined as:

The only design team chosen by the top 10 luxury developers in the state
We increased developers’ sales ratio by 35 percent
Our designers have an average 23 years of design experience and are available 24/6

Once you identify that measurable competitive advantage, refine your marketing message to reflect this characteristic of your company. Take responsibility for the marketing message that gets the bang—that answers: why us?

Put it everywhere, including on your:

Web site
Signs
Business cards
Letterhead
E-mail signatures
Publications/brochures
On-hold message for the phones
Don’t get too attached to today’s competitive advantage. It’s a moving target. Once you identify it, your competitors are likely to copycat it.

Be prepared to review your competitive advantage, so it can be refined and re-defined.

As GE’s celebrated former CEO Jack Welch once said, "If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete"

My quote for the day



"Procrastination and worry are the twin thieves that will try to rob youof your brilliance -- but even the smallest action will drive them fromyour camp."

stop doing list

As Jim Collins emphasizes in his book Good to Great, we need "stop doing" lists more than we need "start doing" lists.

singer Tina Turner! "Sometimes you've got to let everything go...purge yourself. If you are unhappy with anything...whatever is bringing you down, get rid of it. Because you'll find that when you're free, your true creativity, your true self comes out."

Decide today on two significant "stop doings" in your life

Keep going heights in life

Focus

The ability to focus helps separate the good from the great in all professions and disciplines.Asking right questions gives that focus .Knowing your "question" is 80% of the battle

If you've not figured out your business question, take 30 minutes at your next weekly meeting and have your executive team figure out THE question i.e. "how are we going to ..." this year. Then once you think you have the question, peel another layer off the onion and push for what is the real question underlying that question! Get with your family and do the same on the personal side.

Finally

What is your business and personal question for the year?