Barry W Thornton Blog

I received a note from James on my blog about fighting the price battle in a salesman’s mind, he notes:

“What if the problem is the inability to listen and the urge to react without thinking it through? Sometimes I think that’s why we are going downhill.”

Thank you James, good insights and I agree with you.  I don’t think I can find many who will argue that the school system stopped teaching critical and analytical thinking as well as listening a long time ago so the problem is not recent.

But the sales process is designed to handle this.  Given that the basic sales dance consists of:

1 - Introduction - establish credibly and trust

2 - Define the problem you are addressing to get everyone clear on the terms and on the same page

3 - Present a solution that has value to the customer, explain that value proposition, answer clarifying questions

4 - Do a ground clearing Close (push the customer to a start making choices).

5 - Objections - Listen to the objections from the customer, go back to #2 with a modified presentation. Loop through #2 through #5 until until there is either a close, you progress to the next Gate Keeper, you agree to meet again with more data, or they carry your broken body out the door.

Built into this process is the ability to handle James’ issues if you instead have ‘the ability to listen and the personal power to think it through” (thanks James).

This means you must be clever and devious in many ways.  It all falls on the salesman’s brain, dummies don’t sell well.  In fact sales is one of the highest mental arts there is.  All that stuff about rocket scientists, mathematician, etc. is a load of snow (I know, I am one).  They don’t require 1/10 the mental effort as does a good salesman.  In science you have years to figure out the truth of a matter - in sales you have only minutes, maybe only seconds to figure it out, make a plan, and act on that plan.  I find sales infinitely more fun and exhilarating than sitting my office working on epiphanies, which goes to the heart of the matter - nothing ever happens until a  sale is made!

Great ideas happen all the time (and most have little or no value), great closes are as rare as flowers in a snowstorm and even more valuable because they make the world work.

Just about every Sunday I race my sailboat in a fleet out on the lake I live by. We try to go for just over 2 hours, depending on the wind and that means a course of 5 to 15 miles. I have a big boat and race other folks with big boats, we all depend on our crews to make the boat work right, to squeeze the best possible speed at all times on all tacks. We have a strategist, a tactician, guys who make the motor perform (in this case the motor is the sails), and some who drives the boat. We have a management team. For those of you who care, the driver is not in charge (more about that in a later blog).

After 2 and half hours and miles of water on a nice sunny day you can win or lose by an inch, which in that sense is no different that a foot, a yard, a furlong, or a league; you lose and that’s it. It means that every second of the race is critical and any mistakes can be fatal in terms of getting to the finish line first. Because we all make mistakes the general rule is that the guy who makes the fewest mistakes that day wins. Sure you can be second, or third, and still get iron (a trophy at the end of the event), but, well, you understand. Oh yea, there’s nothing for fourth place.

I depend on a team, skill and communication are critical, mistakes happen and they suck, there is no time off, once you cross the start line you are in the on mode for every second until you cross the finish. Let your attention drift on for a minute and you pay the bill.

Martin Luther King used to talk about keeping your eye on the prize, don’t get distracted or diverted, always focus on why you are there.

Does that sound anything like business?

Welcome to shared realities.

Over the last couple of years the mantra FREE has become a big deal in software and web stuff, the idea has attracted my attention but couldn’t see an application. I always looked at it as attracting bottom feeders. How do you build revenues when you give it away? (I know, you get them later or with more features or threaten to cut them off when they get used to it or some other scheme, but it was always about incremental cheap stuff.)

What do you do when your product cost $40k+, can you make that free too?

In some cases, yes. I made us one of those cases so we did it.  We give the hardware free at our dealers. Oh, and by the way, I make more income this way than I ever could selling it. In fact I raised the price to make sure no one buys it so they have to go the free route.

Confused, OK, mine is a special case. I have a product that renders a billable service.  Too expensive to sell easily and without a major marketing effort.

It dawned on me that since the word DISCOUNT sucks when you are on the selling side of the equation that the opposite of MSRP had to be FREE.   I simply said, let me put  it into your place for nothing and let’s split the revenues it generates.  You never buy it, I always own it, you sell the service, and collect the money which we split. Simple, not necessarily a new idea, but one I had never tried. All my life I have sold products as in it becomes yours and you do with it what you want, with it.  I go on to fine a new customer,

Anyway, some folks call it the ATM or Vending machine model.

It is great new world for me.  Now your customer is my customer too because we both get money from them. Turns out there are other benefits too. I now get to see inside a bunch of different ‘retailers” and since it’s in my best interest for the retailer to be very very good at selling and delivering our now shared service, and because of this relationship I have a say in how they do it (if they don’t do well I can take my unit back and get someone else to make money with it), I can make them better even against their will, or perhaps awareness. I learn best practices by watching the good ones and make the poor one learn how to do it right, they have no choice, they make great money with me and that is the glue. If ego gets in the way, if they are dorks, if they are screwing up the market, whatever it is that makes them a poor performer or a pain, I can now fix or flee but I don’t have to suffer. And the revenue flows literally forever.

So I say “Thank You to FREE”, it works in ways I had never imagined.

That’s why we must always learn and adapt.

I have commented in the past on the fact that most sales people are clerks, they take orders, kiss the appropriate places on the customer’s body, and really don’t bring home the bacon. In many ways this is good from some business’s viewpoint, it assures that the sales folks essentially MRs (thanks to the Firesign Theater*, MRs are Multiple-Revendables as in disposables). Replace them frequently.

Can you scale sales this way? Two answers, only without competition is one, the other is that Marketing does the closing so Marketing becomes the salesman. Remember, clerks don’t take business away from others, salesmen do.

So in the competitive environment of the 21^st Century how do you scale? Differentiation in the offering, Value Proposition, pricing, messaging or the like? Some or all of that works for a while but unless the completion is brain-dead it is only a short-term solution. The fact is that you need two things, differentiation to kick start and closers to take business away from someone else and finish. Both say that you will always moving, changing what you have to offer and taking someone else’s customer to offer it to. In essence, doing and seeking.

That’s why I call it foraging. How long do think mankind has been foraging for the next meal?  Have we figured it out yet?

*If you have never listened to the FireSign Theater of 40 years ago you are spending time learning what the past could have thought you about today, Their deadly accurate prediction of the then future culture that we live in today has saved me a lot of time. It’s that old ‘I’ve seen this movie before’ forward looking hindsight that is one of the visions that let’s me cut to the chase and reality check with such ease.

One character issue we assume in good sales people is confidence, there is a whole industry of consultants that claim to be masters of this. Let me offer another view that is what we think of as confidence can in fact be indifference, indifference to rejection, fear, opinion, and the word no. Confidence is a state-of-mind wrapped in emotion, indifference is a state-of-mind wrapped in logic. Emotions are ephemeral, logic is eternal.

Indifference is cold, thoughtful, analytic, and liberating. Without the personal emotional attributes of confidence one appears to be confident in action yet free to be highly perceptive of the reality of a situation and thus its master. Confidence is a projection, frequently competitive in nature. Indifference to confidence is the root of power over a situation. Ever watch to confident sales people with opposing views clash, one must win by overpowering the other. Confidence and indifference is like a jujitsu match, the indifferent party takes the confident one’s energy and uses it to convert thoughts. Let me remind you that the assumption here is that both parties want to win and that is defined as one changing the other mind. Both are equally driven, both have the same goal.

Let me remind you that the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. Love and hate are both passions, both emotions which blind the user. If you are indifferent to the passions they are easy to manipulate and dominate. If you are indifferent to the passions then they are easy to embrace with control and become part of the tool box that makes you flexible to the situation. This kind of truth lets you use passions as needed without your own passions getting in the way. This kind of knowledge mixed with action is real power, which is what is really about to make a sale.

Does this sound strange; I hope you think so, because the point of this wordjive was to make you think about it.

Let’s talk about salesmen for a bit.

First thought. It is said with confidence that 45% of salesmen don’t close. Personally I think this number is low, but I will run with the convention for this Blog.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t bring home the order, it simply means that in most cases they take the order, not develop it, THEY DON’T CLOSE! They function as clerks, not sales people, but of course they claim all the credit. In fact they will claim more credit for the sale because they know their weakness and will lie to cover it.

Because we managers are only interested in results we generally don’t seek to understand the difference. The problem is that this means we are out of control, our salesman’s performance is capricious, based on luck and Marketing in many ways. Is this bad? After all, we got the sale.

It is terrible for several reasons:

1 – We don’t know which of our efforts (marketing or sales) made the event happen, so where do we pour our limited resources, more marketing or more commissions?

2 – We loose predictability, the data about our sales pipeline is false or weak at best. If the salesman is really clerking then he in fact is doing three things.

A – Operating in the blind, most likely deceiving himself in the process.

B – Deceiving us, in essence selling us, most likely lying to us.

C – Not developing the customer meaning that customer retention is going to be harder and we are not getting maximum yield for that customer.

This lack of clear vision means that the actual effectiveness of our Marketing is not really understood, without this feedback Marketing cannot better tune itself, understand the success of that they are doing, get better at it.

Most important, we have a B or C player working for us in a time when A-players are on the market. If we understood the truth we could replace him with an A-player thus future-proof our company by increasing our overall quality of the process, moral, and power of our selling force.

I hope you like your clerks.

Hi there, I have been off-line for about two months doing the 10 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week thing bringing life to a bootstrap start-up I started, fitting the family in has left no time to think or write about anything not related to product development and then sales of my stuff. But this is not about me; it’s about customers and sales.

My product caters to the contemporary Carriage Trade. What’s that you say (I heard that you know, these blogs are two-way . . . sometimes, depends on if I a listening, and I have selective hearing)? Carriage Trade refers to the retailers of old who had no front door; you could only get in by having your carriage enter through a portal to a vestibule. That’s class-

Prices are very high, margins are, well, GREAT. But it is an emotional sale that deals with vanity. The point is that after all this work anyone in my company that even mentions the word ‘discount’ is looking for a pink slip. A killer value prop, and oh yea, we don’t even advertise and sales are, well, justifying it all.

High price, niche market with almost universal appeal, lots of pull. How do you do it?

First of all most other entrepreneurs I run across are thinking in old (10 years ago, how long is that . . . let me tell you, a long f**king time ago!) models, too much internet, failure to really understand the tribal approach, lousy sensitivity to customers, too much sensitivity to people like themselves thinking they are the customer, incremental product, and most fundamentally little or no transformational qualities (see Pine and Gillmore, it’s all about the leading edge of the new-old economy).

Thus you now have all the clues to figure it out. Am I going to tell you how to think to find your own version of my path.

Hell No!

I can’t. Like the old crazy Werner Erhard dude said, even if I tell you, you won’t get IT. It’s not intellectual, it’s emotional, you have to feel it, and there is no way that I tell you how to feel something, you learn to feel it by picking up the bread crumbs such as those I have dropped above, fill in the blank spaces, “feel the Force Luke”, your intuition will tell you. Then you do something entirely crazy, you take the leap, ignore all those SOBs that try to tell you what is right, commit, go crazy, and win the day.

Welcome to the new-old world. Go kick your bankers butt.

Adaos Amigos.

Barry the Curmudgeon

Thank you David Farragut, yes, forget the torpedoes, open up the throttle and kick your life into gear.

We may be looking at the great but final age of the Entrepreneur as we know it. I have a theory that I call the “moo-cow” society. It has nothing to do with politics, or economics, it has to do with society in general and the political/economic reality that drives. I see a world 40 years from now (2 generations that is) where we Type-A characters are, well, lets just say there are a lot fewer of us, and our “A-ism” has an entirely different focus. A society of forced equals where everybody has pretty much the same and conformal. We get a handle on poverty at the cost of the general wealth of the top-end and diversity at the cost of uniqueness. I see this not because of any social justice or morality issue, but simply because that’s the way you put 13 billion people on this planet without them all trying to kill each other. We practice a form of husbandry on the herd of mankind to get predictable and controllable results. Fortunately I will be dead because I find this repugnant, but this is only an opinion and oh, by the way, I am not asking you to believe my theory.

But if I am even close to right, for all this to happen, we really need to be the last generation of unconstrained go-getters. The entrepreneur way of life as we know it needs to change so as to be less unpredictable, less disruptive, less individual. The values in such a society will be aesthetic rather than material. Spiritualism, art and internal reflection will be the basis of the value system; I doubt the dollar, as we understand it now, will be in circulation

Now the political part. Our current new government is adjusting us to this new society. It doesn’t know that it is doing this because our political heroes are just seeking power in the old and ususal way, don’t think that far ahead regardless of what they say.

I tell you this not to get into an argument with you (don’t send me any emails with your opinions, they will go unread and unanswered). I tell you this so you will understand that this is the last great gasp of entrepreneurship as we now know it, 10 years from now it will be, well, different . . . and you won’t like it. So now is the time to make the push to follow your dream. About the time you succeed the rules will be changing in such a way as to assure that no one will be following you. It will be time to take the money and run.

I have always said that the entrepreneur state of mind is lonely; in the future it will be socially unacceptable too. So bask in the glow now, do your ‘thing’ and love it. Welcome to the new reality.

While I don’t do enough of it, every so often it is a good idea to take a short break and ponder who knows what? Here it is, midnight on Sunday evening, or is it Monday morning, and usually I would be in bed reading while the rest of the family slept. As usual I am reading three books at the concurrently, a cute Bob Heinlein novel called Job: a comedy of Justice, a collection of essays called Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think, and a neat little book on humor called Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar . . . . but tonight I am out on the porch looking at the lake lit by a full moon though broken clouds, wind blowing at a good 20 knots, a drink, a cigar, and my industrial strength cat Squeaky whom I sometimes refer to as ‘Squeakal-matter’ (like he cares). We are engaged in a year and a half long drought and is it supposed to rain tonight and oh joy, so far just some drizzle.

I have been working on fund raising for a business I started and was looking for a big chunk of change to get it going. I haven’t had much luck, the financial market has scared most folks, I am tired of the control freaks wanting 51%, VCs are out of the question, and on Thursday I fired my fundraiser. All he could find were people who ultimately wanted a piece of the action for finding someone else.

While I talk a lot about bootstrapping I haven’t done it in a while but a couple of days ago I finally said “F**k it, time to go back to my roots” and I devised a way to get going without playing the investor game. Gawd I feel better, this way I have some control over the process and will be dealing with the only people I really like, my customers. I put together a program, my two guys (COO and CMO) agreed, I got on the phone and found resources to make it happen, and we are off to the races. It’s about time I woke up and took my own advice, boy does it feel good! Trying to please investors can be a pain, their pompous attitude laced with fear stinks the room up. Trying to please customers is a joy, their honesty and happiness with getting a solution is a breath of spring air. As the singing lady Joni Mitchell said, “I’m a free man in Pairs, unfettered and alive!” Damn, it’s nice. It’s what Aristotle said is man’s essential property, his telos. Well the drinks done, the cigar is finished, the cat just squeaked at me that he is bored, and I feel great, time to write some literature.

When was the last time you felt like that?

The other day I was involved in an email thread about bulk mailing. While we on the thread generally agreed that bulk mailing was a bulk waste of time I had brought up a process I had used with some degree of success.  This process involved sending out post-cards with only one word on them.  My theory for doing this was that a post card with one word on it can not be denied, that someone can’t pick the card up and not read the one word as they throw it into the trash.  With this action I have gained brain-space, even if only for a fraction of a second, I got in through the noise, my “word” was in their brain.

“So what?” you might ask.  What does this do for you?

Well consider that you do it a couple of times. That word becomes an accepted data-point.   One way to look at it is brand recognition, you know that brand word.  Maybe you don’t know anything about it but you know the word, it is familiar and in that familiarity it becomes comfortable and perhaps non-threatening.  But it comes with a question.   What is it?

Remember the book/movie “The Manchurian Candidate”? A post hypnotic set of commands is activated with a single word.  Perhaps this is the reverse, a post-hypnotic curiosity is activated by the word.

So you cold-call the individual you sent the cards to and say the “word” in the introduction, the first words you get out before they hang the phone up.   Could this stop them from closing their mind?   Could this keep the door open long enough to get a second or third word in?  Could they be curious enough to ask what it all means?   Could you have a dialog as a result?  Could it lead to a sale?

One word.  What word would you choose?

A little while back I wrote that the real job of marketing is to make the potential customer unhappy with what they have.  I caught some interesting flack about that thought, got accused of being to simplistic naive, and crude.  So to torture those minds I would like to drop the other shoe. . . . good marketers are good Propagandists, the “P”-word in this age of political correctness and propriety.

Propaganda.  What a neat concept.  We use it all the time, daily in fact!  I like Jowett and O’Donnell’s definition.

“Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”

Typically this is an emotional effort; after all, dissatisfaction has a lot of emotional content.  And yes, it is the overt manipulation of an individual or individuals.

Does that bother you?  If it does then you should take some time off and figure out why.  If you are comfortable with it then the real question is how can we get better at it?

The seeds of dissatisfaction, in essence fear, uncertainty, doubt (FUD) should be woven into every message and communication you make to your potential customer, and it should be done purely out of habit.  Happy people rarely change, and selling someone something is all about change.

Propaganda is not evil in and of itself.  Like all tools of mankind, it is the intended use that possess good or evil values (compare its use by Joseph Goebbels’ opposed to Billy Graham’s).  Your values are good if your product or service makes someone’s life better in some way.  Be proud of that.  Propaganda is a powerful tool, use it.

I would like to offer some supporting thoughts as to the value of the bootstrap process, the wisdom of your choice to follow it, and the ultimate practicality of it today.  First a couple of quotes:

Forbes this month (Jan 2009 ) “The venture capital industry is staring at the most vicious shakeout in its  history . . . Returns are pathetic for most funds, [and] the public offering pipeline on which venture depends for its exit strategy is clamped shut.”

Bloomberg.com, “IPOs historically dry up at the end of a bear market and don’t begin to recover for months after a  rally as issuers and investors wait for signs of stability.”

During the last quarter, 38 companies withdrew or postponed their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Bloomberg says “it may take until 2011 for the number of companies going public to return to their 2007 level, according to data compiled by the University of Florida. While the S&P 500 rose an average of 24 percent in the first year after a market plunge, the data show, it takes 34 months on average for underwriting to return to its rate at the start of a slowdown.”

Companies pursuing the traditional VC or investor routes are running into brick walls or valuations that are ridiculous

Yet this is one of the best times to start a business.

We are in a world rich with new technologies, applications of those technologies, services that can be based on those technologies, and perceptions based on those technologies that open unimaginable doors.

Even better, established businesses whose inertia, that is inability to change and adapt, and whose debt or commitment (financial, political, or social) are now untenable are thus going on the rocks and leaving unsatisfied customers with unfulfilled appetites looking for solutions.

This is possibly one of the best times in recent history to apply the bootstrap techniques creating your fortune.  I wish you well and in these stormy times expect to see good results for you on your journey down a good path, stick to it.

Happy New Year and New Era, Barry

The other day I again ran across a major manager, in this case a CEO but this thought is not limited to the CEO class, who is a bully. I was reminded of something that Halibuton* said:

“A brave man is sometimes a desperado; but a bully is always a coward.”

When you meet and observe driven individuals that you will have to interact with it is important to learn early which kind you are dealing with. In business there is a strong lead and/or follow relationship issue in when two or more personalities work toward a transaction or common goal. Fundamental to the relationship is the issue of personal faith, that is in theory you both put faith in each other as an assumptive basis for the furtherance of your activity. It takes a brave person to deal with the truths frequently necessary to succeed, a bit of the desperado is not uncommon for part of the definition of desperado it to be bold enough to cast a fear aside, in this case to do what is right.

This is not the domain of the bully for he is a coward. The bully will use bluster to camouflage that character flaw, most commonly in the form of misleading you with their supposed fame. Bragging, name-dropping, innuendo, implying relationships, generally claiming what is not theirs are the tools they use and that you must watch out for.

As you build your business you are exercising bravery. For the faint of heart do not pick up the responsibility for their lives and the lives of others, they do not follow their dreams. They steal and claim dreams from others.

You will be besieged by bullies who will try to impress you with their skill, power, and virtue. This is always done with the intent of getting their hand into your pocket, to acquire your power and resources, and to leverage you in the launch on to their next victim.

This guy I met the other day reminded me that constant vigilance is the key to survival and success. Thus again, Andy Grove’s motto, “only the paranoid survive” comes home.

Have a prosperous New Year in these trying times.

Barry Thornton, a part-time follower of Socrates

*Thomas Haliburton (1796-1867) Scottish Humorist

Not gold. That’s right, is not gold!

Glitter is a distraction and mental occupier, it is rarely reality. I have found over the years that the more the lights blink, the more noise it makes, the more buzz and glitz produced . . . the less the profits and potential really exist.  By the time the lights are on you are late to the party.

We are creatures whose brains are based on the attention to change. For the couple of million years we evolved in being attentive to the snap of a twig or the flicker of a color in the tall grass was all that kept us alive. Fight or Flee is a core operating paradigm still in our brains. Ever wake up in the middle of the night because of a sound? Did you happen notice that your adrenaline was already flowing, the cognitive part of your brain, the consciousness, was the last part to come on line, you were already to take action when your eyes opened. You hear 300 to 3000 Hertz best because that is the frequency range of the sound braking twigs and rustling grass. You see more shades of yellow because living in tall yellow grass you had to see tiger stripes from dried grass in an instant. You are sensitive to change , it is the basis of our brains, all this thought stuff we do came much later in the brain’s development, in the last 1% of our evolution. Change is what our brains are all about.

Ever notice that one of the first questions out of most people’s mouths is “what’s new?”

We are driven by fads, the presentation of newness. We love it! Look at our response to hype. How about movies and music, the delivered product is typically a let down compared the promise of something new. What is greater than a new love?

I am not saying you should be cynical (which you should) but that this is the pattern of life, newness and change is attractive because we are wired for it (I am old enough to have seen bell-bottom become popular for the third time that I know of so I have to assume it happened many times before I became aware of them in the 60’s). Virtually everything has happened before but it is new to us the first time we experience it, thus it is exciting, it makes our brains perk up and focus, dream, and for a moment we are more alive than we have been in a while. The habituation sets in, we get used to it, it become normal and dull. Thus are we wired to think.

So what is the point for an entrepreneur you ask?

Simple, don’t fall for newness but use it to your advantage, and do so without shame. After all, it is life’s only consistent pattern besides death and taxes.

The other day I was reflecting on office space. The reason for this is that my newest company, Austin Medical Research has no offices, we all work out of our homes. We have labs and engineering space, but that is confidential and thus not open to anyone other than select employees, it is not public space. It is because we are about to do a big expansion in people that I reflect on this issue.

My last start-up (ClearCube Technology) was started in my garage, as we grew we moved into a rented apartment complex on the lake (it had a pool and gym, great view, water access, patio, etc. – all benefits for the employees). After that we moved into a strip mall office space and then we got a new CEO and it all changed. Suddenly our image required a big public space because our customers were Enterprise, Fortune 100 companies and we had to do the dog and pony show all the time.

Do we really need that now? We use a Contract Manufacturer for production and fulfillment so what are the real office needs? Who will come to our office other than people trying to sell us stuff? Who needs to be impressed and why?

None as far as I can see for the near future but let’s look at that closer.

How about the most important people, my customers? We do direct sales to Distributors, Doctors, and Patients. We can stage local events for the Distributors and the Doctors in a rented-by-the-hour presentation office space when needed. We have budgeted visits to them for everything from training to schmoozing, after all this is an Entertainment Economy so we do it right, rent a real stage.

How about Investors? No, if I can impress an investor with my office building and not my balance sheet then I am dealing with morons. They invested to make money, not to satisfy their ‘edifice complex’. As long as they understand that we will stage what we need when we need it (again, this is after all an Entertainment Economy), they have no reason to complain.

How about Employees? All my managers would rather work from home. They get more done without giving up over a hour a day to drive to work. More important I get people who would not relocate anyway. Communications – well we are Skype-nuts, I can see and talk with each on the computer at any time. Meetings can be done at my house or we can rent a space when needed. Skype is the water-cooler and the conference room. All have an equity stake and are motivated. If I hire intelligently most all the rest of the staff can also work at home and Skype to work. Jobs that fall below the independent worker level and require daily supervision can be outsourced as needed, they are so well defined that metrics alone can drive them. In general I get greater efficiency and happier folks. It is a new culture based on the Internet, why not take advantage of it?

How about my bottom line? No office overhead, no receptionist, no facilities person, Outsourcing IT is a gigantic help, office politics and social issues go away, time is used better, where do I stop?

How long can we do this? I think we can do this until fear sets in and we need organized waste for self-validation. I think I am too old for that, are you?

Wow! A couple of days ago someone smacked me upside the head with a Ph.D! It’s been a long time since that has happened and it still tickles.

I was at a lunch of an organization to find out about them and determine my interest in working to get on their Board. I like their premise and know I could help drive them to where they want to go. What I learned was that after 10 month of existence they still don’t know where that exactly is (they’re not a business but a non-profit). Those of you that know me, well, you know how I can be a pain-in-the-neck with my pressure to discover and my thruthaches and the like. So I was torturing the Board to push them to find out what they really want to be and no one understood what I was doing. I ask questions that sound like opinions to get a more profound answer and push people into self-discovery. While I am seeking knowledge they think I am telling them what to do, don’t worry, it is confusing but is style that leads from chaos to order (in a very Shakespearean way). Well, a person there and I had differing opinions and as you also know, I kneel to no one so I didn’t yield to this person’s sense of self-authority and importance.

Anyway, I was taking some heat from them and not responding in the desired fashion when the person in question whipped out the old line ’I know because of my education and my Ph.D!’ It was classic, I couldn’t have found a better line in movie. Surprise - I did conduct myself as a gentleman, I didn’t fall down laughing or say the obvious. I just looked around at the other folks to see if anyone else got it, some did, some didn’t.

I like these folks and what they ultimately can do, I would like to help.

But to the point, which is that you as an entrepreneur are subject to lots of people trying to influence you. Many of them have lots of letters before or after their name. Typically those letters say that person may know a whole lot about a narrow topic. None of those letters indicate that the have any COMMON SENSE.

Only you know the real truth about your enterprise, only you know the real goals, only you are responsible for what happens, only you live it. Don’t ever let an ‘expert’ dissuade you from what you know is right.

I repeat - THERE ARE NO DEGREES IN COMMON SENSE!

Does that make sense?

copyright Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

I was talking with an old friend, he has problems with some property, the zoning, and it’s future use as perceived by the city he lives in. Seems the city wants turn the area into a hipper, more modern area and didn’t like his industrial use of the property, they wanted to fine him and directed him to make some expensive changes. As we talked about it I realized that the only way to beat them (the city) was to take over the leadership. The old ‘find a parade and then get in front of it’ approach, something that politicians understand intuitively which why they are politicians; they have nothing to offer but the appearance of leading. In essence, I told him to “out politician the politicians”.

Politics is perhaps the best marketing in the world. The best of ‘someone is unhappy and we will lead them out of the wilderness and onto the blessed fields of plenty, sign here, and here, and, oh yea, sign here too!’

My friend is an entrepreneur. After our conversation he made up a sign to put on the wall of his office, he FAXed me a copy and I used it as the title of this blog.

He went on the attack, got a meeting and sat down with his City Councilman who immediately explained to him that he, the Councilman, couldn’t influence the zoning enforcement people. My friend didn’t complain about zoning but explained that he wanted to become a participant in their plan and do it now. He noted that the expensive work for the present zoning (which would be different in the new use plan) would mean he couldn’t spend the money on an architect to create the new plan to fulfill the City’s dream. And he wanted to be the first to get this dream going. The now cordial Councilman meeting ended, they shook hands and smiled.

A couple of days later my fiend calls up the enforcement agent to try to get a couple days extension on the compliance review. The agent’s boss remarked that the Councilman called and said that they had a good meeting, the review got put off because the zoning guys were suddenly busy, and that they would like to see his ideas to work with him on the direction. My friend is now leading the parade, not being trampled by it.

Now I know this is a long story but what does it mean to you as an Entrepreneur?

This is not about honey rather than vinegar. It is about getting those who you thought were leading to instead be follower. Your power is in your movement, it is mental jujitsu; use your antagonist’s energy to get what you want by stepping up the pace, get ahead of him. Sometimes your antagonist is an association you work with, sometimes it is associates that can’t focus or move clearly.

Just something to keep in the back of your mind as you work to change the landscape of your world.

Copyright Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

I had noted in an earlier Blog that the key to marketing is to make someone unhappy, it is then the job of sales to them make them happy again, that’s how the two work together. - - So what are the tools of unhappiness?

Try F.U.D. the acronym for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt!

If someone is happy with what they have you clearly aren’t going to sell them a replacement. Only when you break the relationship between what they have and how they feel about it can you expect to get new brain space, and brain space is what you need to convert them into a customer.

So F, U, and D are three great pry-bars or tools you can use to loosen up some brain-space. All of them start out as probes, until one hits a chink in the armor and gets some traction you have nothing, you just slide around on the outside of someone’s “satisfaction shield”.

You must probe with constant FUD questions to elicit response that will start someone thinking. Do this and in most cases a door will open.

Is this marketing or selling? Maybe it’s both.

Anyway, you must do a series of probative adverts, always asking questions that center around ‘what makes you think you are happy?’. Maybe you communicate a message that shows why they should be unhappy or happier. Maybe you do positioning statements or explanations that are really questions in disguise. Statements with words like ‘new’ or ‘better’ or the like are really questions, they ask ‘why don’t you have the newest or the best?.

Ever consider that the opening of any sales pitch is a marketing message or proposition? You bet it is! Every opening sales pitch is essentially an advertisement. Even if the target says no and walks way, just how is that different than having looked at an ad in a magazine or on TV ,and passed on it? It only becomes a sales pitch when some brain-space opens up and an idea enters the mind that can feed the unhappiness and start a change to occur.

In most ways technology marketing and sales is the easiest. Technology offers an addictive solution. Whatever the customer has, it is on the way to being out of date, not enough, too slow; whatever was good about it making the customer happy is now fading away. Technology is about change and change means something better is coming. It is only a matter of time.

What does this mean to the entrepreneur? - - It means two things. One is that the range for new ventures is almost unending and virtually unlimited, it is as wide as the scope of human endeavors and ideas. The second is that you only need to change one thing to make it new; only one problem has to be solved to tap a market. Your business will be based on what makes someone unhappy.  It really is simple after all.

copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

An oversimplified generality that is reality.

Much of marketing is about the message.  And what is the message about?  It is about making someone unhappy.

The message is that what they have now makes them unhappy and what you have to sell will make them happy.

A primitive view of one of the most elusive crafts in business but it is true.  They won’t pick up the phone or tap the keyboard to find out about you unless they are motivated - and being unhappy is one of the best motivators there is.  Your message is not about making them happy, it is to remind that they are unhappy and that there is a way to eliminate that feeling.

Too short and too simple, it must be right.

Think about it.

It is far too easy for us to want to simply charge ahead once we have an idea.  Part of the problem is that we love our ideas, they seem so clear, so easy to implement, so clearly going to succeed. Ideas are breed  and steeped in enthusiasm.  We see a problem, we solve it with a new idea, our mind is in love with itself.

How many times have you seen this happen in others and in your self?

Along comes the idea, the solution, and we kick the ol’ horse in the sides and Giddy up!

One thing that kills off so many entrepreneurial efforts is that Giddy up part.  When we start a business we are inundated with challenges, we need many solutions, and each is a new idea inthe making.  When we are hurdling forward through time and space, spending money and resources to solve those problems that appear so critical we hardly ever look at the Whao-Back side.  We get ahead of our selves.

It used to be that our choices were reasonably limited, we could take the time to understand and appreciate each one of them.  Today our choices are almost infinite, each seems to have its own advocate, and they always to have to be selected immediately. We jump ahead full of energy, masters of the half-baked idea based on untested assumptions, only to stumble on our own feet.

This can be foolish, fanciful, and fatal.  Whao-Back counts a lot, try not to run amuck.