Do It! Marketing Blog: Marketing for Smart People™

I was browsing through my ebook edition of Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich and this particular passage jumped out at me.

Thought you should see it. YOUR comments welcome below in the COMMENTS section... just scroll down and let me know what you think.

9 Reasons People Fail

1. Lack of well‐defined purpose in life. There is no hope of success for the  person who does not have a central purpose, or definite goal at which to aim.   Ninety‐eight out of every hundred of those whom I have analyzed had no such  aim.  Perhaps this was the major cause of their failure. 

2. Lack of ambition to aim above mediocrity.  We offer no hope for the person  who is so indifferent as not to want to get ahead in life, and who is not willing to  pay the price. 

3. Lack of self‐discipline.  Discipline comes through self‐control.  This means  that one must control all negative qualities.  Before you can control conditions,  you must first control yourself.  Self‐mastery is the hardest job you will ever  tackle.  If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.  You may see at one and the same time both your best friend and your greatest enemy, by  stepping in front of a mirror. 

4. Procrastination.  This is one of the most common causes of failure.  “Old  Man Procrastination” stands within the shadow of every human being, waiting  his opportunity to spoil one’s chances of success.  Most of us go through life as  failures, because we are waiting for the “time to be right” to start doing  something worthwhile.  Do not wait.  The time will never be “just right.”  Start  where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your  command, and better tools will be found as you go along. 

5. Lack of persistence.  Most of us are good “starters” but poor “finishers” of  everything we begin, moreover, people are prone to give up at the first signs of  defeat.  There is no substitute of persistence.  The person, who makes persistence  his watchword, discovers that “Old Man Failure” finally becomes tired, and  makes his departure.  Failure cannot cope with persistence. 

6. Negative personality.  There is no hope of success for the person who repels  people through a negative personality.  Success comes through the application of  power, and power is attained through the cooperative efforts of other people.  A  negative personality will not induce cooperation. 

7. Lack of a well‐defined power of decision.  Men who succeed reach decision  promptly, and change them, if at all, very slowly.  Men who fail reach decisions,  if at all, very slowly, and change them frequently, and quickly.  Indecision and  procrastination are twin brothers.  Where one is found, the other may usually be  found also.  Kill off this pair before they completely “hog‐tie” you to the  treadmill of failure. 

8. Over‐caution. The person who takes no chances generally has to take  whatever is left when others are through choosing.  Over‐caution is as bad as  under‐caution.  Both are extremes to be guarded against.  Life itself is filled with  the element of chance.

9. Wrong selection of associates in business.  This is one of the most common  causes of failure in business.  In marketing personal services, one should use  great care to select an employer who will be an inspiration, and who is, himself,  intelligent and successful.  We emulate those with whom we associate most  closely.  Pick an employer who is worth emulating. 

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Need a great marketing speaker for your next association conference, company meeting, or franchisee/dealer event? Marketing speaker David Newman delivers the goods - over 600 presentations since 1992.
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And then leave a comment below with your questions, thoughts, and advice on the ideas above.

Are you a DO IT freak? Welcome to the club!! Please use the social media buttons at the top of this post to share it with your network. YOU are a rock star!

In my work with small business owners and professional services firms, I'm often asked about how to truly stand out in the marketplace.

Questions include:

• How do you brand yourself?
• How can you stand out from the crowd?
• What are your differentiators?
• Why should they hire you/buy from you?
• What's your value prop?
• How is working with you different, better, smarter?
• How can you prove your "Return on Investment"?

The answer is NOT about your products, your services, your branding, your logo, or anything else about what you SAY or how you SAY it. 

Bottom line is that people pay a LOT more attention to what you DO and how you DO it.

So I hereby proclaim myself to be an "All You Can Eat Speaker" - let's see how many of my speaker colleagues dare to try this:

For $30,000 I will speak at as many events you want for a whole year. Use me twice - I'm a $15,000 speaker. Use me 10 times, I'm a $3,000 speaker. Use me 20 times I'm a $1,500 speaker. (plus travel expenses, of course).

Details on topics you can choose from are here:
Marketing Speaker David Newman

Point/Lesson for YOU (no matter what your business happens to be - mine is speaking and marketing) = Business Model Innovation.

Forget what you're selling and help your prospects buy what they're buying.

I can't stand when other speakers have fee structures like this (and no, I'm not making this up.) A professional speaker client came to me with this fee schedule - no names to protect the guilty:

• 45-60 min: $7500
• 60-90 min: $8500
• Half day (up to 2.5 hrs): $9500
• Three quarters day (up to 4.5 hrs): $10,500
• Full day (up to 6 hrs): $11,500

Are you kidding me? Are you a thought-leading professional running an expert business or are you a cab driver charging by the minute or the mile?

Corporate executives, line managers, and association meeting planners are NOT buying minutes!

They're buying results, outcomes, headaches and heartaches that disappear; they're buying more time, more money, more freedom, more answers, less hassles, fewer goofballs, reduced waste, more signal and less noise.

Can YOU deliver that?

• I can.
• $30k.
• All you can eat.
• Meeting planners, conference producers, business owners, chamber executives, marketing VPs, franchisors, convention chairs, state association programmers - I welcome your inquiries.

Email or call me (610) 716-5984 between October 18 and November 19 and I'll tell you where to send the check. On Nov. 20, this offer goes away.

Fellow professional speakers - I welcome you to compete with me. In fact, I dare you!

Think I'm nuts? GOOD!! Leave a COMMENT below and let's mix it up right here, right now... I'm ready!

As a marketing speaker and marketing coach on the front lines of the meltdown economy, I'm seeing firsthand and through my clients that marketing has become even more challenging because – now more than ever – your buyers are lazy, busy, and befuddled.

See if some of these characteristics ring true with YOUR prospects and buyers over the last few months:

Lazy: Your buyers do not look forward to being marketed and sold to. The old standards of good, cheap, and fast have been replaced with the new “Web 2.0” standard of perfect, free, and now. Instant gratification, easy to buy, and effortless to install are the new watchwords for marketing and sales success. The expert at hand is the expert who gets hired.

Busy: Buyers have a million things on their plate besides researching the best options for products, services, vendors, partners, and trusted advisors. You need to become the obvious choice, the smartest choice, and the least risky choice – all in the span of a very short amount of time to be heard above their (internal and external) noise.

Befuddled: Buyers are overwhelmed with information, choices, data, specs, features, benefits, and marketing hype. It can be hard to separate the best service providers from the best marketers – and rarely are they one and the same. Your buyers have been burned, disappointed, and let down by slick marketers in the past.

So what can you do?

You won’t win them over with sizzle so your only choice is to convey TWO things with the utmost clarity and conviction:

1. We understand what you’re up against

2. We can fix it

That's marketing in a nutshell, folks! Agree? Disagree? Comments? Fire away down in the COMMENTS section and I'd love to hear from YOU...

The Challenge

Too often, professional services firms:

• Do marketing “by accident” or don’t do outbound marketing effectively
• Hope that “prospects will call us when they need us”
• Never know where their next lead is coming from
• Don’t market using their best asset – thought leadership
• Throw too many dollars into a “marketing black hole”

The Opportunity

Independent research with over 700 professional services firms proves that the #1 source of new business is “Making warm calls to existing clients” – and #2 and #3 are “Speaking at conferences and trade shows” and “Running our own seminars and events” yet if yours is like the majority of firms, you haven’t yet cracked the code on how to make this work for YOUR people to attract YOUR clients.

More research shows that 52-72% of B2B professional services BUYERS are willing to switch to new service providers across a spectrum of specialties. (Wellesley Hills Group, 2009 What’s Working in Lead Generation professional services market study)

Meaning: You’re always ONE good presentation away from closing new business.

The Payoff

Professional services firms and thought leaders within large companies can often do a MUCH better job in the following areas:

• Design and deliver a client-magnet presentation

• Generate leads without being salesy

• Use Before-During-After marketing to stay top of mind

• Maximize profits on a shoestring marketing budget

• Generate more leads, better prospects and bigger sales using irresistible offers and high-integrity techniques

...and in my experience working with clients like this, it does NOT take huge amounts of work; small, targeted shifts in your packaging, promotion, messaging, and followup makes all the difference (which we usually nail down over the course of 1 or 2 days together and then the floodgates open!)

Last Word: Marketing Skills vs. Presentation Skills

A decent presentation built for marketing and sales results will outperform a brilliant presentation built for a “standing ovation” or praise from your local Toastmaster’s club or high marks from a presentation skills coach.

Bottom line: I don’t care if you become a great speaker. I do very much care that you become a good speaker who consistently generates more leads, better prospects, and bigger sales each time you present in front of a roomful of potential buyers.

What do you think? Fire off some thoughts, comments, or questions in the COMMENTS section below. Let's talk about this one...

Professional speaker marketing tip

Most professional speakers, consultants, coaches, and solopreneurs have a hard time moving into a niche or declaring a specialty. Most want to attract as much business as possible, so they go for broad marketing across all topics, categories, and industries, trying to attract all audiences for all that they can offer.

If you fall into this trap, your marketing messages get spread so thin that soon, you’re spending more and more time, effort, and money on marketing and getting less and less return. Does this sound familiar?

The truth is that successful experts know who they are – they “move aside” and specialize in a niche. They focus more energy on marketing their “flagship” services to a very specific target market.

Why? Because – unlike Wal-Mart or Citibank, your business can’t be all things to all people. “Move Aside” is about finding your niche, and claiming your expertise in a narrow area of specialty. In plain English, this means you want to become the “Go-To Guy” or “Go-To Gal” for your specific audience – the exact opposite of a “jack-of-all-trades and master of none.”

Perhaps you want to be known as “the consulting firm that knows the insurance industry inside and out” or “the restaurant marketing coach” or “the manufacturing turnaround expert.”

Maybe you want to appeal to corporate executives with an elite image or appeal to family business owners with a homespun image.

The people you speak with will have a very different reaction to these two mental images of your products/services:

• “I think you might be a good fit...”
  
• “Finally! You are exactly who we’ve been looking for!”

Let me give you an example that will make this point very clearly.

In my hometown in suburban Philadelphia, there’s a real company that lists among its services “Carpet Removal, House Cleaning, Odd Jobs, Catering.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I want a caterer, I’m looking for someone who does professional catering all the time. I don’t want to have to worry about “Did they wash their hands after the carpet removal job and before serving the guests at my daughter’s wedding?”

In fact, even among “serious” catering companies (the ones that don’t do carpet removal) if I’m looking for a caterer for a wedding, I’ll probably be drawn to “Wedding Bells Catering” much more so than “Sam’s Catering” or “Good Eats Catering.” In today’s marketplace, specialists rule.

Create your own special niche. Developing a specialty can go a long way to attracting more substantial clients. Being known as the “experts” in a particular field gives you the opportunity to stand out from the crowd. This is the edge that will tend to draw prospective clients to you. The bottom line: more speaking gigs, more consulting offers, more coaching clients, more revenue, more referrals, and taken together, just a whole lot more fun in running your professional practice.

The fact is that the marketplace values clarity, focus, and direction.

Once you become known for being great at one thing, your company can spread its wings and start to attract more business across the board through a powerful “Halo effect.” If you get known over time for being great at one thing, in the future, people will begin to naturally assume you’re great in a variety of other ways, too. However, if you try to say you’re great at everything on Day 1, nobody will believe you!

The only way to know if this will work for your business is to try it! You’ll be pleased with the speed and magnitude of the results.

What do you think? What's YOUR success story with moving aside? Agree? Disagree? Please use the COMMENTS area below to jump into the conversation...

My advice for both emerging and experienced professional speakers is to "invest in the relationship" with meeting planners and conference producers. What do I mean by that and why is it important for your success?

Invest in the relationship with meeting planners means it’s not always about the money. Most good conference producers and meeting planners consider themselves in the speaker marketing business, the speaker visibility business, the speaker credibility business. When I spent a year working "on the other side of the desk," I was thrilled to work with some incredibly accomplished and successful speakers – CSP’s, CPAE’s – because they SAW that fact.

The company I worked with had 350,000 subscribers and sent out over 10 million emails a month. If you were one of my speakers, that’s the scope and scale of reach you got from us. Your topic, your credentials, your website. 700,000 eyeballs. Do the math. (And see my note at the end of this post if you'd like to get in on this yourself!)

Today, as a speaker marketing coach, many of my professional speaker clients ask me "How do I establish visibility and credibility with my target market?" THIS is precisely one of the best ways!!

Don’t get me wrong – our speakers got paid – but it was a lot less than you might get for a corporate keynote. I know that and you know that. Put your ego in the back seat for a minute. Be willing to invest in the relationship Because if you do a great job the first time, meeting planners and association executives are often in a position to…

a. Raise your base fee

b. Revenue share with you

c. Publish your articles in hardcopy publications, websites, and blogs

d. Publish and distribute your manuals, training guides and e-learning tools

e. Promote you any way they can

For example, I had speakers start doing audio conferences for $500, and then gradually, as the relationship evolved, move up to getting over $40,000 in royalties and revenue share in a single year from our various projects together. On the other hand, if as speakers we ask for all that up front, we won’t get it.

My advice to you at the beginning of any relationship with a meeting planner or event producer is Recognize the marketing/PR value, and let the relationship develop. To adapt a favorite saying, “Do what their audience loves and the money will follow.”

NOTE: You can find a whole lot more of these "information publishing companies" that produce audio conferences, webinars, live events, and niche hardcopy and online newsletters by visiting their professional association, the Specialty Information Publishers Association (SIPA). Perhaps one or more of these companies would make the perfect partner for YOU to expand your thought leadership platform - and get known, get booked, and get slightly famous!

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If you're an emerging or established professional speaker and it's time raise your marketing game, it's not too late to join the Speaker Profit Blueprint program...  everything has been recorded and transcribed for you and our live sessions continue through May 4, 2010. Contact me to see if joining this program might be a fit for your speaking/consulting/coaching business and your specific goals.

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With so many other conferences being cancelled, cuts in travel budgets and staff reductions, we must do what is best for our institutions during this period where generating revenue and reduction in spending has become a top priority. We apologize for the inconvenience and will be keeping the AMMC ( http://artmuseummembership.org/ ) website live with updates on next steps.

We will also be posting the program, with the speaker's information, so that you can contact the person directly with your questions. We will continue to think of other ideas on how the website can be utilized.

Thank you!

The AMMC Advisory Committee
http://artmuseummembership.org/
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My take on this -- please re-read this sentence and look at the crazy backwards logic of it: we must do what is best for our institutions during this period where generating revenue and reduction in spending has become a top priority.

Hellloooooooo.... Isn't that THE #1 reason to have the conference - to HELP your members "generate revenue and reduce spending" while increasing ROI, serving THEIR customers better, and innovating with agility and new skills to combat the outside conditions that no one can control?

This is scary thinking, folks... I'm fully aware of economic reality, but this pretzel logic just makes me want to shout from the rooftops -- YOU NEED MEETINGS NOW MORE THAN EVER!!!!!

Good luck trying to figure out where to go from here ON YOUR OWN.

-- David