Your Wealth Profile, and, The Biggest Problem With Being Smart

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I attended a very interesting presentation by Roger Hamilton last night on the recommendation of several people I respect [thanks Kris, Ray and Therese <-- no website?! What are you like?]

Roger has developed a fascinating and instructive “Wealth Profiling System” that combines
Jungian psychological models (think MBTI tests etc) and the I Ching as it relates to individuals’ wealth attraction styles. I have done my wealth profile here and discovered that I am predominantly a “Mechanic”.

Roger also shared a couple of seminal distinctions that resonated with me. Here they are:

On taking action:

To know, and not to do, is not yet to know.

On traps for smart people:

One of Roger’s mentors once told him,

You think you’re smart. You try to do everything yourself. That’s why you’ll never be really wealthy. I know I’m stupid. That’s why I employ smart people like you to do everything for me.

Food for thought…

Two Types Of Leverage

I have recently been focussing on employing two types of leverage to increase my personal effectiveness and productivity.

Systematic Leverage: Using systems to do the heavy lifting for me. These include CRM automation, automatic billing systems, automated data backup systems and so on.

Personal Leverage: Engaging people who are much better qualified to do specific tasks than myself – designers, bookkeepers, technical people and so on.

So far the results are pleasing — I’ll report back with some more detailed results at a later date.

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Marketing Success Stories Podcast #1 With Anders Sorman-Nilsson from Thinque

A week or two back I had the pleasure of interviewing Anders Sorman-Nilsson from Thinque, a Sydney-based NLP and Communication Training Firm.

Anders was recently featured in the recently released book, Secrets of Great Success Coaches Exposed, (available for purchase at the Thinque website right here.)

So often, the reason why busines people fail is not because they don’t possess the skills, experience and abilities necessary to succeed, but because they don’t have the right mindset. In this podcast we discuss some strategies for creating a winning mindset.

Download the podcast here (Right Click and Save As…)

Anders has used these strategies in his work with peak performers in the world of business, sport, music and more… Check it out!

Special Offer: Order the Sectets of Great Success Coaches Exposed book here and have it shipped straight to your door anywhere in Australia free of charge.

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Do You Nurture Leads, Or Do You Just ‘Follow Up’?

Brian Carroll recently made an interesting post on his B2B Lead Generation Blog that draws an important distinction between nurturing leads and merely “following up” with periodic, are-you-ready-to-buy-yet? calls.

My company’s focus is on improving the profitability of our clients’ online sales channels, but I’m becoming increasingly aware of the need to ensure that lead gen efforts are tightly integrated into the sales process as a whole.

Front-end lead generation activities tend to receive a lot of the marketing “glory” and can be a source of great leverage (especially online, where you can test, track and optimise everything in real time), but it’s just as important to pay attention to what happens after the lead has been generated.

“Lead Nurturing” vs “Following Up”

The more complex (read: expensive) your product or service, the more lead nurturing has to be done, especially in a B2B environment.

Nurturing needs to go beyond your CRM-system reminding you to make an are-you-ready-to-buy-yet call. While followup calls are better than nothing, complex sales processes demand more subtle solutions.

How To Nurture Leads More Effectively

1) Timely response

The best time to convert a lead into a sale is as soon as possible (assuming that a lead has been properly qualified). In more complex sales situations or when dealing with large organisations, sales cannot necessarily be closed in days, but quick response times (e.g 4-hours) to initial calls and subsequent followup enquiries create an excellent impression and are unlikely to be matched by competitors.

Timely response is even more powerful for cheaper and/or less complex products, where “convenience” forms a larger part of the purchase decision.

2) Regular, value-added communication

Keeping in touch with prospects on a regular basis with relevant, value-added information is critical. This may include newsletters, white papers, technical updates, audio interviews or video presentations, invitations to events and so on. The key is to stay on message with high-quality information that is offered as a service to prospects.

3) Strategic conversion process

Your methodology for converting prospects into clients is another key levearage point. The 80/20 principle tells us that certain steps in your conversion process will produce a far greater effect than others.

One client was who was selling six and seven figure software systems for an international software company in a past career made the very interesting discovery that ALL new clients had at some point attended a 2-hour evening workshop. Getting bums on seats in those seminars thus became the focus of lead generation activities, yielding exponential results.

What step or steps of your conversion process are responsible for most of your completed sales? What could you add to boost your conversion rates and speed up your sales cycle? What could you take out without any loss of results?

4) Multi-modal contact

If leads are of sufficient value, experiment with varying your contact methods. Go beyond a monthly newsletter to include phone calls, hard mailings, webinars and face-to-face events.

Although newsletter lists and autoresponders provide huge automation benefits, they do have limitations – not the least of which is the sheer volume of emails that are competing for your prospects’ inboxes and mental bandwidth.

There is just one word you need to keep in mind: VALUE. Most DM communications that I critique are professional-looking but ultimately self-serving. By focusing on providing value your communications will be enthusiastically received.

5) Appeal to different VAK Learning Styles

Different people process information in different ways according to their VAK (Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic) profiles.

Some people are “visual” – they learn best by seeing.

Others are “auditory” – they learn best by hearing.

Others are “kinaesthetic” – they learn best by doing.

Varying your communications to appeal to different learning styles is another way to increase the overall effectiveness of your lead generation activities.

Use diagrams, charts, powerpoints and video to appeal to Visual types.

Use audio programs, video (with audio) and live presentations to appeal to Auditory types.

Use interactive webinars, surveys and live workshops to appeal to Kinaesthetic types.

In the past, my own lead nurturing activities have been mainly print-based (specifically, wordy newsletters and articles). While these have produced good results, there’s no excuse in this day and age not to offer other delivery formats including audio and video, which is what I’m doing now.

Where to start

In a sense, “lead nurturing” covers a good proportion of the entire sales and marketing process. If you know you could be nurturing leads a lot more effectively, but are not quite sure where to start, here are some ideas:

1) Do you have a functional CRM system that integrates your sales and marketing efforts?

Without this, you can’t begin to nurture leads effectively. We use and work with Salesforce.com which offers a range of pay-per-seat solutions to suit all sizes of organisation. Many other industrial-strength CRM systems will do the same thing.

2) Have you instituted “closed loop tracking”?

That is, are you able to track your marketing progress right from the lead through to the sale and lifetime value of each client? Depending on the size of your organisation, this can either be relatively easy to set up or a major IT project, but the value that this provides is enormous – it allows you to concentrate on the lead generation activities that lead to the greatest number of sales conversions.

3) Do you have a organisation-wide lead definition that everyone in sales and marketing understands and uses?

Unqualified leads frustrate salespeople and waste your time, money and energy. Defining exactly what a qualified lead looks like is a great first step toward knowing exactly whom you should be nurturing.

4) Have you identified where your leverage points are?

If you know the key drivers for qualifying and closing sales (e.g. a seminar, an onsite demonstration, a product trial), you can focus your marketing efforts on driving these high-yield activities.

5) Do you have all your prospects’ contact details?

Do you know all your prospects’ email addresses and physical addresses? If you don’t, start a database-cleaning exercise (e.g. handled by well-trained telemarketers). By making some kind of offer at the same time as cleaning the database, you can turn this into a self-liquidating exercise or even turn a profit.

6) Do you have a documented lead nurturing system?

Even if your sales nurturing system is one 6-monthly followup call, that’s a starting point. Which one or two things could you do to add the most value to the customer experience?

Here are some suggestions:

• Send a white paper in print or electronic form.
• Send or stream a video of a relevant presentation by your CEO or other executive.
• Conduct an industry survey and report back on the results.
• Hold an event or seminar.

7) If you do have a documented followup system, are your salespeople following it?
Compliance with a documented followup system is just as important of having the system in the first place. Many CRM systems have “compliance” functions built-in, but ultimately having a system that works effectively is the surest way to get salespeople to stick to the system.

Will Swayne from Marketing Results specialises in lead generation and online sales funnel optimisation. He can be contacted via this contact page.

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7 Simple Productivity Tips

I’ve recently come to the realisation that the concept of “productivity” is especially vital for professionals, consultants or indeed anyone involved in time-for-money income generation.

Where your time is your main productive asset, getting more done in less time – and having more than enough time for fun and relaxation – is hugely important (then there’s the issue of shifting from a time-for-money model to a more scaleable model, but that’s a whole other discussion).

In the past 2 weeks I have literally doubled my productivity by following a few simple rules.

I now work fewer than 40 hours per week and am earning 300% more than the same time last year, when I was working 60 hours per week.

Here are my…

7 Simple Productivity Tips

1) Only check email at 12 noon and 4pm (thanks to Tim Ferriss for this tip). This one simple step has been massively powerful and liberating all at the same time. This one saves me an hour a day, minimum.

2) Every evening I write a “For Action” list for the next day, outlining my 20% items that produce 80% of the results for the next day. Every day I attack my most important item first.

3) I keep my “For Action” list on my desk and when small “to do’s” or distractions pop into my head I make a side note so I can deal with small items in batches later on and not break my focus from the task at hand.

4) When checking email or attending to other smaller tasks, if a task will take 2 minutes or less I do it then and there (thanks to David Allen of GTD fame for this one)

5) I’ve replaced my mobile phone message with the following:

“Hi, you’ve reached Will Swayne’s phone. I’m unable to take your call right now. Please leave your name and number, plus the reason for your call so I can get to work on it before I call you back. Thanks for calling.”

This simple distinction avoids the common scenario of playing phone tag just to find out the reason for a call before you even get around to doing something about it.

6) Being mindful of non-value adding steps in processes and working to reduce or eliminate them. In the past, when I was working on, say, a 5-step process, I might have been responsible for sequential steps A, C and E and a designer responsible for B and D.

I would often find myself supplying step A only, creating an extra communication loop in the process when C was required later on. Now I try to supply ALL information to eliminate the non-value adding steps in the middle.

Obviously this can’t always be achieved (for example, proofreading has to take place at the end), but just being mindful of this and taking action where possible has yielded some positive results and cut down on wasteful back-and-forth emails.

7) I’m in the process of implementing David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. While this is very much a work-in-progress (and something that I’ll write about in greater detail in future), some of the concepts have already come in useful for freeing up mental RAM. For example, I’ve closed off a few outstanding projects (what David Allen calls “open loops”) that had been occupying my headspace for some time, leaving more mental bandwidth for the important stuff. I even surprised myself the other day when I located 4 separate documents for my accountant in less than 5 minutes!

Try the 7 steps

I’ll wager that these 7 steps will yield big results for you too when you try them. Do you have any additional low-effort, high-reward productivity tips you’d like to share? Leave a comment!

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Recommended Copywriting Books

Reader Carlos Cabezas emailed me this morning asking which direct response copywriting books I could recommend.

Rather than reply via email I decided to post a reply for all to see.

Most copywriters seem to be voracious readers with a large collection of reference books in addition to a “swipe file” of copy examples.

Although I don’t write much copy any more, here are some of my favourite reference books (in no particular order):

Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples

A magnificent “how-to” manual that explains the most important and timeless principles of copy that sells. If I could only read one book on DR copywriting, this would be it.

Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins

Timeless principles of successful advertising and marketing. Because this book is out of copyright and is freely available, I have seen a few people treat this book with less respect than it deserves, calling it “simplistic” and “outdated”. But the principles contained inside are timeless and just as effective as ever, when used judiciously.

Advertising Secrets of the Written Word by Joe Sugarman

This book is a pleasure to read. Sugarman’s prose is sheer elegance. The book also contains dozens of real direct response ads that were successful sales-magnets (plus a few approaches that flopped). Sugarman’s use of short, 1 to 3 word “grabber” headlines is also instructive, especially when working with print media.

Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Not so much a book on copywriting per se as a book on how to pitch your product or service offering to the market. Pure gold.

2,239 Tested Secrets for Direct Marketing Success ed. Hatch

As the title suggests, this book contains thousands of tips, takeaways and “rules of thumb” that can make your copy sell more.

The Copywriter’s Handbook by Bob Bly

Most of the tips on copywriting in this book are also in other books (after all, there are only so many timeless principles), but the section on how to get work as a copywriter is useful if you are thinking of copywriting as a profession.

Million Dollar Mailings by Denison Hatch

A veritable encyclopaedia of the most profitable and longest-running direct mail control pieces in history. Fascinating reading and very useful for constructing your own mailings.

Other Great Resources

For online copywriting, I’m a big fan of Michel Fortin’s stuff and I also subscribe to his membership site. And of course, for advice on melding sizzling copy with killer marketing strategy, you can’t go past Jay Abraham.

Do you have any copywriting or marketing books that MUST be included in a Best-Marketing-Books-Of-All-Time Hall Of Fame? If so, leave a comment!

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1 Minute Productivity Tip: Don’t Check Email Until 11am

Like many people, I’ve fallen into the bad, bad habit of over-checking email.  While email is a great tool (although some people like Dan Kennedy would argue, a non-essential one) – it is a huge time-waster if not managed carefully.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been experimenting with a new email management strategy:

Don’t open your email program until 11am 

The theory behind this is that if you check email first thing (as I used to do), you tend to get caught up in a range of non-essential, non-urgent busywork that can take up most of the morning and get your day off to a bad start.

By getting started on your most important item first thing, you make real progress and build up unstoppable momentum for the rest of the day.

Although this tip sounds simple, I estimate this one idea alone has boosted my productivity by at least 10% (although I was a heavy user to start with Your mileage may vary.)

Give it a go and let me know how you get on.  If you have other simple 1-minute productivity ideas, leave a comment.

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