For the most part, that’s fine, because the solo professional needs to engage in prospecting AND lead generation, whereas in a larger company with a marketing department and sales team, the activities are more clearly delineated.

It’s safe to say that, for both the solo professional and larger companies with different departments, a prospect is someone who expresses interest in your company and what you do, but is not necessarily interested (yet) in purchasing your product or service.  You might think of a prospect as a prospective lead, client or customer.

In a larger company, the sales person engages in prospecting activities, like networking, generating referrals, and cold calling.

The marketing team, on the other hand, is usually in charge of lead generation activities — like direct mail, publishing white papers, creating social media marketing campaigns, investing in traditional and pay-per-click advertising, etc. — the (hopefully qualified) leads from which they pass onto the sales person(s).

A lead, then, is someone who has expressed interest in purchasing something.  They are a prospect that has gone the extra step to show that they want to buy, and they want to learn more about your line of services and/or products.  Oftentimes, they are categorized with a numerical value or an adjective (like “hot,” “warm,” or “cold”) to indicate the degree to which they are motivated to buy once they become a lead.

As you can see, it’s easy to collapse the two terms — Prospect and Lead — and their corresponding activities, so that they appear to be one and the same thing.  For the most part, even I refer to prospecting activities AND lead generation activities as subsets of Marketing, when it’s probably more accurate to say that lead generation activities are really the beginning of the sales cycle.

However, like I mentioned, for the solo sales professional or independent business person who IS both marketing and sales team, the distinction is essentially meaningless.

This is especially true when you aren’t generating an influx of qualified prospects (people who are interested in what your company and what you do) and leads (people who have expressed interest in buying from you) on a consistent basis, anyhow.

In a recent survey of independent sales professionals I conducted, nearly 60% of the respondents revealed that “generating qualified leads” was their biggest sales challenge.

When I asked them to list their top 3 challenges in order from the most pressing to the least pressing, “generating qualified leads,” “generating leads,” or “generating quality leads” were listed in each of the top 3 challenges.

Has this also been your challenge?

In response to this need (AND to celebrate completing 40 years on the planet!), in March I am offering complimentary Lead Generation Tune-ups!

[It's very exciting because this is part of a month-long series of no-cost celebratory opportunities you can take advantage of (I'm calling this festival of events "Prospectpalooza") to support you in generating qualified prospects and leads.  More on these events very soon!]

I’m committed to helping 40 sales folks in 4 days (I just turned 40, after all!) boost their prospecting and lead generation efforts during these sessions.  It all happens March 22, 23, 24, & 25.

Will you be one of the 40?  I hope so!

I’d love to help you create your own customized Lead Generation Action Plan.

Take action today to reserve your spot.  Sign up at http://yoursignatureappointment.genbook.com, and you and I will have tons of fun.

Because (whatever you call them!), more (qualified) leads, prospects, and clients means more FUN, don’t you think?!

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image license: Some rights reserved by Yann Ropars

Because the topic is Cold Calling — and I have to admit I’ve had aversion even to the name — I almost did not sign up to attend Wendy’s webinar last week called “How to Sell Your Way Out of a Sales Slump.”

I actually do not know how I came to know about it only about 24 hours before it was to happen, but I am very glad I attended.  It absolutely shot holes in my perception of what cold calling is.

Before I share with you what Wendy calls “Insidious Myths of Cold Calling,” on the webinar, she acknowledged that the phrase “Cold Calling” is itself a loaded term.

Her answer to that?

“Call it something else, if that supports your ability to be successful.”  An example might be referring to Cold Calling as “Introductory Calling” or even “Networking.”

Sometimes a simple name change makes all the difference in the world.  But, what if you (like me) had an incorrect understanding of what Cold Calling is in the first place?

Wendy Weiss address 4 specific Cold Calling Myths right upfront:

Myth #1:  “Cold Calling is a Numbers Game.” Of course you have to dial the phone to talk to prospects, but simply calling anyone with a pulse is not an effective use of anyone’s time or effort.

Myth #2:  “Open Up the Phone Book and Start Making Calls.” No wonder people hate cold calling!  Like Myth #1, blinding calling random people in the phone book is a recipe for disaster and is neither efficient, nor sustainable.

Myth #3:  “You have to go through the Nos and the hang-ups until someone finally says Yes.” Talk about demoralizing!  This is also the “Numbers Game” mentality, which positions you as a telemarketer rather than a professional.

Myth #4:  “You have to practice rebuttals because prospects just want to get you off the phone.” Cold Calling is a skill set that can be mastered, and that skill set is about saying the right thing so that people say “Yes,” not about knowing what to say when people say “No.”

What a load off to finally debunk these myths about cold calling!

And when you come to think about it, attending a networking meeting and going up to a perfect stranger to introduce yourself is something of a “cold call.”

In fact, Wendy says that the same communication skills that are necessary for success with other forms of prospecting are also needed when using cold calling as a prospecting strategy.  In all cases, these skills require learning and practice.

So, why would I choose cold calling over other prospecting methods?

Well, if you are using other prospecting methods and are consistently getting qualified leads and prospects, then you absolutely should continue doing what is working.

That said, I think none of us should be all of our eggs in one basket.  Our businesses should have multiple points of entry and ways for people to experience what we have to offer them.

Wendy Weiss offers an additional perspective on Cold Calling versus other prospecting methods.

Most marketing, she observes, is “inbound.”  That is, it depends on the prospects themselves getting in touch with you rather than the other way around.  This makes tactics like referral marketing, advertising, networking, and Web 2.0 activities (as they are typically practiced) inherently passive because you have to wait for someone to do something.

Cold Calling is active marketing because you go to the prospect to invite them to have a meeting with you.

How do you do this successfully, in a way that feels magnetic, authentic, and fun?

Wendy Weiss offered 5 Keys to Successful Prospecting with Cold Calling on the very informative webinar last week.  Unfortunately, she didn’t make available a recording, but fortunately, I took good notes!

In a future blog entry, I will share her 5 Keys to Successful Prospecting with you so that you can begin putting the ideas to use.  They will support you whether you decide to adopt cold calling as a new marketing strategy or if you simply want to improve the rate of success of your existing marketing.

You’ll be happy to know the 5 Keys apply powerfully to both inbound and outbound methods of filling your prospect pipeline.

- – -
image license: Some rights reserved by Graham_B

To tell you the truth, I was a little skeptical.

Bob Burg endorsed the authors of Go for No! (Andrea Waltz and Richard Fenton) on his blog, and when he was here in Portland, he pointed them out to me in the audience.  At the end of Bob’s Endless Referrals Live in Portland program, Andrea and Richard came up to me to introduce themselves and to gift me a copy of their book.

So, why was I so skeptical?

Well, who in sales really wants to hear “No” to what they’re selling?  I can’t think of anyone, can you?

Yet, sales trainers from time immemorial have taught a version of a Go-For-No philosophy.  Among other things, they preach you must be willing to plow through as many nos as possible until you get a yes.

How absolutely demoralizing!

It’s that whole mindset that goes with the obsession with overcoming objections. As far as I’m concerned, we’re not in the business of figuring out what to say when someone says “No.” We’re in the business of attracting folks who already want to say “Yes” to what we’re selling!

This was the frame of mind I was in when first introduced to Andrea and Richard’s compelling (if off-putting) title: Go for No! Though I better understood where they were coming from after hearing Andrea speak at Lori Richardson’s Fab 50 Tour stop in Vancouver, Washington, I still didn’t “get it” at a core level.

But, then, I read the book.

Now, I’m pretty much a convert — so much so that after reading the book on Tuesday, I immediately decided I had to offer it as a valuable door prize at a networking event I was cohosting on Wednesday.

Why such a miraculous conversion?

Well, now I don’t actually have the book.  Some lucky sales professional won it. So, until I get another copy, you’ll have to rely on my memory and the few notes I scribbled on a note pad while reading the book.

One of the first lessons that stood out for me is that failing and failure are two different things.  Just because you failed to reach a certain goal doesn’t mean YOU are a failure.

(One caveat about semantics is that there are certain words that no amount or degree of appropriation will make them mean something else.  So, when asserting linguistic distinctions, it’s important to be responsible and take carefully into account historical, social, cultural, and political context and influence.  Language does not exist in isolation.)

The example the authors give in the book is of a child asking a parent for something she or he wants —  say, a cookie, for example.  When the parent says “No, you can’t have a cookie,” the child remains undeterred, asking again and again.

He or she may or may not get the cookie, but the point is that the child does not equate rejection of the request with rejection of him- or herself as a person.

Sadly, for many sales professionals, when someone rejects their product or service, it feels as if they were rejecting them.  Somewhere along the line, comments Richard and Andrea, adults have lost the “natural sense of tenacity” that children seem to be born with.

If you haven’t read the book, I want to say upfront that the following insight may be considered a spoiler, so you may or may not choose to read on before you’ve read the book. But as you’ll see, the lesson was particularly pivotal in the “miraculous conversion” that led me both to give the book away last evening and to be extolling its virtues in this blog right now.

(By the way, I do have a couple of minor criticisms of the book, but they will have to wait to be shared at a later time.  This blog entry is already a longer than I intended.)

So, the book is written in parable form and it opens with the protagonist having a goal to make 4 sales that week.  On Monday, he makes 3 sales right off the bat.

Time to celebrate, right?

So, off he goes on Tuesday and Wednesday, allowing other things to distract him.  It really doesn’t seem like a big deal.  After all, he’s never missed quota before, and he only has 1 sale to make this week.

Piece of cake.

I won’t tell you what happens that actually ends up derailing his week altogether (Something about Dorothy, the Land of Oz, and eventually returning back home to Kansas!), but isn’t that a perfect example of what salespeople typically do?

The average salesperson slows down when they reach (or approach, as in this case) their goal.

The cure to this common challenge?

Go for No!, of course  Rather that set the usual “Yes Goals”, Andrea and Richard advise us — through the pages of their parable —  to create weekly (or daily) “No Goals”.

Sounds weird, doesn’t it?

How this works is let’s say your normal goal would be to make 2 sales this week.  In order to do that, you know that you’d need to talk with 5 qualified prospects to close 2, for example.

If you happened to close 2 right away, the usual tendency is to stop or slow down. But, if your goal was instead to get 5 Nos, getting 2 yesses right away would mean you were BEHIND, not ahead.

You’d be compelled to reach for the stars, not for what’s safe.

This is the psychological brilliance behind the Go for No! philosophy, as taught by Andrea and Richard.

To drive the point home, one of the characters in the book, asks the protagonist something like ‘Would a manager keep a player out of the game because he was on a hot streak?’

The reason most sales professionals slow down or get out of the game when they are on a “hot streak” is because they are focused on Yes Goals (which are also typically Safe-of-course-I-can-make-this Goals) rather than getting super-excited about pursuing No Goals.

Get the book.  Read the book.  Apply the book.

As Andrea and Richard often say (which takes on a completely new meaning for me now): “Yes is the destination. . . No is how you get there!”

- – -

image by Brian Negin, under a Creative Commons license

So, let me ask you: “What grade would YOU give yourself at this point?”

Inspired by Kim’s question and by Coach Christian Mickelsen, I sent the following “Sky-Rocket Your Sales” coaching session offer to members of one of my email lists, and I’d like to make it also to you.

Regardless of where you are in your business, there is tremendous value in checking in from time to time to make sure your headed in the direction (and at the speed) you desire.

What better way to kick off the second quarter of the year than with a coaching session focused on you and your sales goals?

It’s pretty challenging to achieve the success you deserve when you don’t plan for it.

So here’s my invitation to you (Thank you Christian and Kim!):

- – -

If you’ve been struggling to close enough sales and you’d like a major breakthrough, then I’d like to invite you to take advantage of a special, “Sky-Rocket Your Sales” personal, 1-on-1 coaching session where we will work together to…

=> Create a crystal clear vision for the sales success you desire (we’ll set targets for prospecting activities, and ‘close ratios’ that will give you the lifestyle you desire)

=> Uncover hidden challenges that may be sabotaging your sales success (we’ll pinpoint specific areas that cause breakdowns in the sales process so you can make immediate changes)

=> Leave this session renewed, re-energized, and inspired to break your personal sales records and enjoy a great income.

If you’d like to take advantage of this very special, very limited, and totally FREE 30 minute “Sky-Rocket Your Sales” coaching session, copy-and-paste the following questions into an email message, answer the questions, and email them to tshombe @ yoursignatureconsulting.com (remove spaces between before and after the “@” sign):

1. How long have you had your current sales position?
2. What kind of product/service do you sell?
3. What are your sales commission goals for the next 12 months?
4. What were your sales commissions from the last 12 months? (ballpark)
5. What do you see as the major challenges holding you back from selling as much as you want?
6. On a scale of 0-10, how important is it for you to overcome your challenges and achieve your sales and lifestyle goals today?
7. Full Name
8. Email Address
9. Phone #
10. Time Zone

Check off the areas you’d like to work on…

__ Finding a Great Prospect List
__ Prospecting
__ Assessing Needs
__ Presenting Your Offer
__ Overcoming Objections
__ Closing the Sale
__ Getting Referrals & Up-Selling
__ Other

Since we’re making this offer for the first time right now and we don’t know how intense the response will be, we can’t guarantee a coaching session for everyone.

We’ll take as many people as we can and then start a waiting list.  You can expect to get contacted by our team to schedule your session within the next 3 business days.

If you don’t hear from us, it means we’ve received more requests than we can handle right now and if something opens up we’ll get in touch with you at a later time.

Again, to take advantage of this offer, simply answer the questions above, copy-and-paste into an email message, and send to tshombe @ yoursignatureconsulting.com.

Warmest Regards,

Tshombe

- – -

I’m looking forward to hearing from you, you Magnetic Entrepreneur, you!  Together, we’ll create a powerfully magnetic sales success plan for the second quarter and the rest of the year!

I’m honored to have a man of Jonathan Farrington’s stature write this guest post on The Magnetic Entrepreneur weblog.

Enjoy, and take notes!

~ TB

By Jonathan Farrington

This post is in response to a comment that was left regarding my recent webinar – “How to Become a Sales Superstar in 2010”

The question was:

“Why does Jonathan put knowledge at the very top of the pyramid? Can you touch on that? What knowledge is he defining, specifically?

Knowledge of the product/service, or something else?”

I am delighted to be able to offer this expanded response.

I first began to recognise the need to be able to benchmark sales performance more objectively and more rigorously over twenty five years ago: The motivation to do this was strong because I knew I was wasting thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds on sales skills training programmes which were not providing me with a proper return on my considerable investment. But I needed to prove my theory because without an accurate analysis of my requirements, I would continue to abdicate that responsibility to the training providers, most of whom had only their own interests at heart.

So with this quote from Drucker, “The most effective way to manage change is to create it” firmly in my mind, I set about my task; a task that became a journey, which began in 1981 and is still ongoing.

By taking an analytical approach, I arrived at the following equation:

Attitude + Skills + Process + Knowledge = Success.

My initial reasoning was this: Attitude is fundamental to any achievement because individuals with the right attitude are far more likely to embrace the essential Skills, recognise the control that Process brings and have the desire to continually expand their Knowledge.

Skills are the ‘tools of the trade’ and have to be developed on an ongoing basis. They also need to be specific, because too much time can be wasted over-burdening employees with inappropriate and irrelevant skills without any identifiable plan for their future requirements.

Process brings organisation, efficiency and control, both for the individual and for management. Effective process provides objective analysis and indicators which can be benchmarked and accurately measured.

Then there is of course a need to build in knowledge and that must include knowledge of products, industry, market sectors, competitors, business, own company and last but not least, self!

So you see, at the bottom of my pyramid, is the foundation – attitude.

But never think that you can remove any one of these four factors from the equation – you do so at your peril. Each is equally important if you are to achieve sustainable success.

You can also catch his hugely popular daily blog at The JF Blogit – http://www.thejfblogit.co.uk

These masterclasses are about $60 for non-members, but my fabulous friend (the Sales Coach & Fundraising Auctioneer) Lori Richardson gifted me this one for free.  (Thank you Lori!)

The topic was “How to Become a Sales Superstar in 2010,” and it centered around Jonathan’s 4-tiered Success Formula Pyramid.  The four tiers are Attitude (the fundamental foundational piece), Skills, Process, and Knowledge.

As we find ourselves beginning the last month of the first quarter of the year, how are you setting yourself up to be Sales Superstar this year?  Where can you improve in these 4 areas?

Here is a graphic depiction of Jonathan Farrington’s Success Formula (Click to Enlarge):

I just learned that you can download (or listen online) this webinar from the Jonathan Farrington’s Blog, or by clicking HERE, but I want to offer a few of my notes on each of these four components to Sales Success Superstardom — a position that is absolutely within your reach.

1. Attitude:  Jonathan says there are two types of personalities:  The “running away” personality, which describes people whose behavior is driven by the desire to avoid pain, and the “running towards” personality, defined by people who are in control, prepared, and allow themselves plenty of time to accomplish what they set out to do.

   Which personality are you cultivating?

   Jonathan puts Attitude at the bottom of the pyramid, the fundamental component of success in sales.  Plan for success by improving and nurturing your “running towards” attitudinal personality, mindset, and action-orientation.

2. Skills:  Sales professionals and teams tend to perpetuate mediocre results because they assume that skills are needed, but have no diagnostic approach to ascertaining exactly what skills are needed, how and when they are needed, and how they will be assessed and measured before and after the training.

   Skills are another foundational component for success, but it must be the right skills at the right time with a specific, clear, and tangible Return On Investment (R.O.I).

   Key Point:  Your training is your responsibility, and it must be continuous and ongoing.

3. Process:  Many sales professionals are resistant to employing process in how they approach sales.  To them, it feels like a time-consuming chose.  Yet, the most successful sales professionals embrace a sales process, which actually saves time.

   In the age of Sales 2.0, exploring and incorporating social media and online tools (examples:  SmartSellingTools.com and FillTheFunnel.com)  in your sales process is essential to sales success in 2010.

4. Knowledge:   Knowledge itself has several components beyond Product Knowledge.  How would you rate yourself in the following additional areas:

• • Industry Knowledge
  • Sector Knowledge
  • Company Knowledge
  • Competitor Knowledge
  • Commercial Knowledge
  • Self Knowledge

That sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?

It is indeed a lot to take in, assimilate, and put into systematic action.  But, do you think you could make just a 1% improvement in 1 or more of these areas each day or each week?

It’s the small, incremental approach to improvement that wins the race every time.

“Every journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step,” quotes Jonathan.  ”Why not take that step today?”

Another colleague is in the medical field and expressed how much he hates having to sell a client on another visit or series of visits.

It’s a common challenge.  “Sell” is a dirty four-letter word to so many solopreneurs — especially to those who consider themselves “heart-centered” entrepreneurs.

I can understand that.

No one likes the feeling of being manipulated, hounded, chased or hunted down by a too-enthusiastic (to put it nicely) salesperson.

However, provided you have done the research and are connecting with someone who needs and wants your services, clients and prospective clients WANT you to offer them your services.

In fact, if you know your service or product is the best thing for them and you genuinely are interested in their well-being, you are doing them a disservice if you do not market to them and make appropriate offers.

That said, selling the person is really the very last thing you want to be thinking about anyway.  When you go out on a first date with someone, do you immediately ask them to marry you?

(I hope not!)

What is needed is a specific marketing plan, where your prospect sees your message over and over again until they are ready to buy, ready to refer someone to you who is ready to buy, or they tell you to stop marketing to them.

Another possible purpose behind a marketing plan might be to establish and maintain relationships with colleagues, persons with specific industry influence, and referral partners.

In most cases, sales professionals give up too soon.  They don’t have a follow-up system in place that they follow regularly and consistently.

This may be why my friend wondered whether he was bothering people.  Without a system, all efforts to market or follow-up are random, at best, and you really don’t know when and how often you are following up with someone.

Besides that, if you don’t follow up regularly with people who have shown interest, they may forget who you are or that you provide the service they are looking for when the time comes that they need it.

People have so many choices about where to spend their money, positioning yourself so that you occupy a prominent place in their minds requires actively and frequently reminding folks in your target market about how you can solve their challenges.

Gary Keller in his The Millionaire Real Estate Agent points out that over 86% of buyers and sellers (in 2002) met with only one or two real estate agents.  “In the battle for real estate consumer mind share, you’re either first or second or you’re out of contention.”

With most consumers pre-shopping for homes (or anything else, for that matter) on the Internet, I’d wager that this is even more important today.

In almost every industry (not just real estate), there are tens or hundreds or thousands of people who do what you do.  How are you standing out and differentiating yourself?

How often are you reminding qualified folks of that difference?

People want you to educate them and make life easier for them.  They are so busy with family, work, and other obligations that if you give up out of fear of looking like the proverbial “used car salesman”, they will have already forgotten about you.

This personal example I’m about to relate is a little embarrassing because it illustrates how disorganized I can be (and I bet I’m not alone in the disorganization department!), but I’ll share it anyway.

Just last week, I met with Portland, Oregon-based Corporate Shaman, Jacke Schroeder.  For the last several weeks prior to that, Jacke left me several messages via email, social media and phone before I finally got back to her weeks later.

(I told you it would be embarrassing.)

Was I uninterested in connecting with her?  Did I feel she was bothering me?

On the contrary, I let myself become so consumed with who-knows-what-all that I didn’t respond to her efforts to communicate with me.  Still she (thankfully) persisted.

After meeting with her last week, I now know that she and I will be working together in some capacity in the near future.  I’m kicking myself for letting so much time elapse.

What an incredible loss for both of us had Jacke decided she’d had enough of my silly antics!  I may never have called her back!

I imagine all those prospects you let slip through the cracks may have a similar story.  With SPAM filters, multiple inboxes, and having to check multiple voicemail messages, who’s to say your potential client even got your last message?

Of course, no professional wants to feel like they are wasting their time.  Certainly, if a prospect tells you they are not interested (like unsubscribes from your newsletter, for example), I don’t recommend stalking them!

Craig Klein of Sell, Sell, Sell! suggests that sales professionals get to fire their prospects after following up with them a certain number of times without a response.  He even offers a way to do this via a voicemail script (complete with a downloadable pdf tip sheet you can print out and place right at your phone when you’re doing the “firing”!) you can drop right at the end of your follow-up system.

This, of course, assumes you have a follow-up system in place in the first place.

It also assumes that the person you are spending time following up with is really a qualified candidate for your services and likely needs and wants what you have to offer.

If that’s the case, if you do change nothing else, follow up!  Show your prospects you care and are thinking about them.

Your perfect clients WANT to hear from you!

Do you recognize any of these in you?

What small step can you begin to make today to improve?

1. You are desperate to make the sale. Just like the poor old (or young!) sap in the dark corner of the seedy bar starving for a date tonight, the desperate sales professional is guaranteed to go home alone.
2. You hate being sold. Buying and selling are two sides of the same coin.  People hate feeling manipulated, but LOVE being sold what they want and/or need.
3. You have low self-esteem. If this is your challenge, you’re not alone.  Check out my article on The Rapunzel Complex that drives the behavior of many business owners and sales professionals.
4. You do not truthfully see (or are not able to clearly articulate) the enormous value of the product or service you are selling. Without a high level of belief in your product or service, selling it consistently is not sustainable long-term.
5. You fail to understand or embrace the concept that selling can be a spiritual practice.
6. You refuse to define your ideal clients and target market because your service or product “can help everyone.”  This philosophy/approach wastes time, money, and energy.
7. You are learning (and relying on) sales tricks and closing techniques at the expense of real connection and relationship-building.
8. You feel squeamish about ‘asking for the sale.’
9. You don’t want to “bother people,” so you fail to follow-up consistently or at all.
10. You don’t have a clear point of differentiation, so you find yourself always having to justify or compete on price.
11. You have a poor or nonexistent sales process.

Today I’m committed to relaxing and essentially doing a whole lot of nothing (It’s my birthday!  Happy Birthday to me!!!), but first I wanted to share with a couple of key take-aways from Iyabo Asani’s awesome interview.

At first glance, any talk of “Inner Genius” appears on the surface as New Agey, wu-wu, or “out there.”  Certainly, it seems a bit far-fetched to equate something called “Inner Genius” with success in business and sales.

That’s why I was intrigued with what Coach Iyabo would say on the matter, especially from the perspective of someone who practiced law for over 16 years!

(Not exactly a touchy-feeling occupation!)

In essence, what Iyabo is talking about when she uses the term “Inner Genius,” is accessing the whole person in everything we do.  In other words, using Whole Brain and Whole Body Wisdom to make decisions and execute based on them.

Most people, Iyabo says, are working their businesses (and their lives) based almost entirely on information received from the Left Brain.  This source of information includes our reasoned directives on how and in what way we should sell our products or services.

Left Brain information is sequential, orderly.  It’s highly developed and where we do all of our learning.

However, says Iyabo, if we’re solely operating from the Left Brain Paradigm — which is based on our skills and talents and the acquisition of more skills and talents — we’re missing the boat because “Inner Genius” is comprised of 5 components, not just one.

They include:

1. Left Brain:  As noted above, the Left Brain is Scholastic, Logical, Linear.  Its mode of learning is rational, analytical and sequential, and looks at constituent parts of a thing or idea or concept.
2. Right Brain:  Right Brain thinking is creative and non-sequential.  It’s described as random, intuitive, subjective.  It synthesizes holistically and looks at “wholes” of a thing rather than “parts”.
3. Emotion:  Emotion is more related to Right Brain than to Left Brain, but is not thought of as “Thinking” at all.  It’s associated with feelings, in this “Inner Genius” paradigm.
4. Body:  Iyabo associates the Body Component with Energy Centers in the body called Chakras (“Chakra” comes from the Indian Sanskrit word meaning “wheel” or “turning”).  Each Chakra corresponds to a Value, says Iyabo.  So every decision or action in business or in life must also be aligned with the Body Component of Inner Genius.
5. Spirit(uality):  Iyabo offers that we are all spiritual beings and that ‘Connection with a Higher Being’ is essential to accessing all of each person’s Inner Genius in the business of business and sales and marketing.

Sound intriguing?

Want to learn how to more fully utilize Inner Genius in your life and business?

The replay recording is available online and as a free download at http://SalesSuccessSeries.com/iyabo/reg.html, where Coach Iyabo offers concrete examples of how to use Inner Genius and answers listener’s questions live on the call.

Now off to more birthday fun!

I also mentioned the challenge real estate agents have distinguishing themselves from every other real estate agent in the market.

Can you relate?

For most in the sales professions — including mortgage brokers, financial planners, car salespersons, real estate agents, etc. — positioning and differentiation are challenges…..and so is patience.

I think one of the biggest issues people in sales have with their marketing is lack of consistency.  A case in point is that in the last 6 months, I’ve received maybe 20 different mailings from real estate agents in the form of “personal” letters and postcards.

And that was from 20 different agents!  Do you think I remember the name of any of them?

Gary Keller in The Millionaire Real Estate Agent quoted NAR statistics that basically boiled down to the fact that in the mind of buyers and sellers, they only have room for one or two real estate agents.  This means that your goal is to be number 1 (preferably) or number 2 in the minds of your potential clients, or else you’re out of the running.

How do you do this?  Well, not by sending a postcard once every 6 months!

A couple of years ago, I sent out three postcards (the same, identical postcard) to a targeted list, spaced out over a period of about 10 weeks.  Just 2 days after the third mailing, a woman phoned me excited that she just received my postcard, it was just exactly what she needed, and inquired why hadn’t I sent the postcard sooner.

The truth is that I had sent her the very same postcard twice before — and she probably gave it at least a cursory glance both of those previous times — but it was only the third time that she had actually taken notice and read it carefully.

Whatever lead-generation and marketing strategies real estate agents are using, the key to occupying the first or second spots in the minds of consumers is developing and implementing a solid system or frequent and consistent contact.

People are so bombarded with junk and offers and mailings, it really takes more than what you probably are doing to encourage your ideal clients to remember and think of you when they are ready in the sales cycle to buy.  When they’re ready, you want them to buy from you!

On the matter of systematic marketing, Gary Keller introduces “overkill” as the approach real estate agents should take.  “Why?  Because no matter how much frequent and systematic lead generation is emphasized, most real estate agents still tend to underdo it.”

Does this describe you?  If so, it may be a key reason why your marketing — however polished and targeted and magnetic it may be — may not be producing the results you desire.

Any relationship takes time and effort and consistent follow-up.  RISMedia posted an article last summer that addresses this, and it concludes with 5 ways to develop a marketing relationship with clients.

(The tips are courtesy of Simon Payne, marketing expert and creator of ReadyToGoNewsletters.com, designed and marketed to/for real estate agents.)

They are:

1. Develop a way of communicating regularly with people, using print newsletters, e-mail newsletters, postcards or greetings cards. Write and design communication devices yourself, or choose an off-the-shelf product.
2. Make sure to provide valuable, interesting and entertaining information to prove your expertise and to be of genuine service to your clients and prospects. Beware of cookie-cutter newsletters that don’t allow you to customize the content. To build a genuine relationship with your farm you need to provide relevant, personal information to your readers.
3. Communicate on a regular basis-at least every month-in order to build and maintain that relationship. People have short memories, so it’s important to have a continual presence in clients’ lives to maintain a strong connection with them.
4. Be aware that building relationships with householders in your farm and with clients is a long-term project — keep communicating with them on a regular basis for months and years to get the best results.
5. Understand that marketing is an investment, not a cost. If, for example, you close just one transaction per year as a result of your newsletter program you will have paid for it many times over.