by Helena Escalante | Growth, Habits, Leadership, Marketing, Mindset, Tools
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 5 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Persuasion
— From The One Sentence Persuasion Course: 27 Words to Make the World Do Your Bidding by Blair Warren (you can read the short original document published in 2005 here)
In this short but powerful ebook, Blair Warren boils down the concept of persuasion to its most basic principles that go hand-in-hand with some basic human needs. And he encapsulates them in one sentence. “Not a sentence that one delivers, but a sentence that one remembers. A sentence that can help guide your efforts from beginning to end in virtually every situation imaginable.”
And what is that sentence?!
“People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies.”
Let’s take a quick look at these basic principles, “they are the tools for anyone who must connect with others and, more importantly, make these connections pay off.”
On encouraging their dreams…
“Parents often discourage their children’s dreams “for their own good” and attempt to steer them toward more “reasonable” goals. And children often accept this as normal until others come along who believe in them and encourage their dreams. When this happens, who do you think has more power? Parents or strangers?”
On justifying their failures…
“While millions cheer Dr. Phil as he tells people to accept responsibility for their mistakes, millions more are looking for someone to take the responsibility off their shoulders. To tell them that they are not responsible for their lot in life. And while accepting responsibility is essential for gaining control of one’s own life, assuring others they are not responsible is essential for gaining influence over theirs. One need look no further than politics to see this powerful game played at its best.”
On allaying their fears…
“When we are afraid, it is almost impossible to concentrate on anything else. And while everyone knows this, what do we do when someone else is afraid and we need to get their attention? That’s right. We tell them not to be afraid and expect that to do the trick. Does it work? Hardly. And yet we don’t seem to notice. We go on as if we’d solved the problem and the person before us fades further away. But there are those who do realize this and pay special attention to our fears. They do not tell us not to be afraid. They work with us until our fear subsides. They present evidence. They offer support. They tell us stories. But they do not tell us how to feel and expect us to feel that way. When you are afraid, which type of person do you prefer to be with?”
On confirming their suspicions…
“One of our favorite things to say is ‘I knew it.’ There is just nothing quite like having our suspicions confirmed. When another person confirms something that we suspect, we not only feel a surge of superiority, we feel attracted to the one who helped make that surge come about. […] It is a simple thing to confirm the suspicions of those who are desperate to believe them.”
On helping them throw rocks at their enemies…
“Nothing bonds like having a common enemy. I realize how ugly this sounds and yet it is true just the same. Those who understand this can utilize this. Those who don’t understand it, or worse, understand but refuse to address it, are throwing away one of the most effective ways of connecting with others. No matter what you may think of this, rest assured that people have enemies. All people. It has been said that everyone you meet is engaged in a great struggle. The thing they are struggling with is their enemy. Whether it is another individual, a group, an illness, a setback, a rival philosophy… when one is engaged in a struggle, one is looking for others to join him. Those who do become more than friends. They become partners.”
Lastly, in all of this information, did you notice there is something missing? YOU! “There isn’t a word about your wants, your needs, your hopes or your concerns. There isn’t a word about your offer or proposal. There isn’t a word about what you think. It is all about the other person… Can you even imagine how much more charismatic you will become when you come to be seen as the one who can fulfill some of their most basic emotional needs?”
ACTION
TODAY & FUTURE: Just as the sentence is simple, the action for today or the future is very simple too (yet not necessarily easy): whenever you need to prepare a document, a presentation, a campaign, sell a product, promote your business or your brand, or do any activity that requires persuading others, utilize one or more of the angles that the author mentions. Print the sentence and keep it handy so that you can reference it and use it often.
Do you want to persuade someone to read this blog? (Hint, hint!) Please encourage their dreams of professional growth and share with them via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Creativity, Growth, Leadership, Marketing, Mindset, Opportunity, Planning
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 37 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Best in the world
— From The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin
The best in the world. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But why is it important? And what exactly does “the best in the world” mean?
A simple Google search for time management yields 138 million results. This implies that there are 138 million resources in cyberspace to help us figure out how to manage our precious time wisely.
Because we are all pressed for time and we don’t like taking risks are the reasons why being #1 matters. “If you’ve been diagnosed with cancer of the navel, you’re not going to mess around with by going to a lot of doctors. You’re going to head straight for the ‘top guy,’ the person who is ranked the best in the world. […] When you’re hiring someone for your team, do you ask your admin to give you the average résumé, or do you ask him to screen out all but the very best qualified people?”
“With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top.” Also, “being at the top matters because there’s room at the top for only a few. Scarcity makes being at the top worth something.”
People who are looking at doing business with you (or with the business that you represent) will be wondering if you are the best in the world. And that deserves a new definition that Godin describes majestically:
“Best as in: best for them, right now, based on what they believe and what they know. And in the world as in: their world, the world they have access to.”
If I’m looking for a dry cleaning service that doesn’t use toxic chemicals, I’ll go with the one that uses organic products to clean, that offers a quick turnaround service, that is affordable, and that is close to where I live. That’s the best in the world for me.
“World is a pretty flexible term… Now there are a million micromarkets [and] each micromarket still has a best. And being the best in that world is the place to be.”
The consumer is the one that decides what is best, thus the term is subjective. And the term world is “selfish,” because it’s the world that the consumer defines based on preference and convenience.
The world got bigger with the Internet opening up a lot of different options to fit our needs and wants. Yet the world also got smaller because of specialization and niching down. Since we cannot be everything to everyone, and the mass market is changing rapidly towards specialization and customization, being the best in the world just got a new definition that, thankfully, involves us all if we want to pursue it.
ACTION
TODAY: Think about your micromarket and write down the answers to these questions: What do you offer that no one else does? What can you be the best in the world at? What needs to happen for you to position yourself to be the best in the world—in your world—however big or small? Also, talk to a few clients or customers today and ask them how they would describe what you do and what value you provide. The answers will reveal things that you may have either taken for granted or would have never even crossed your mind, but that are valuable to your customers.
FUTURE: Talk to as many customers as you can. Find out what are the key aspects of your business that you have to highlight and promote according to what your customers define as best in their world. Then set up a road map to get there. Work on becoming the best in your customers’ world and you and your business will flourish.
Note that this applies to business as well as to any other personal endeavors that you’re involved in: How can you be the best friend in the world? Or the best volunteer in your church? Or the best parent who organizes the bake sale for your child’s school this year? Our lives are made up of different mini-worlds in which best in the (mini)world applies too, for our benefit and the benefit of all involved.
Know someone who needs to read this? Be the best friend in their world today by sharing with them this post via email, Facebook or Twitter!
by Helena Escalante | Creativity, Leadership, Marketing, Planning, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 55 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Own a word in the prospect’s mind
— From The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! by Al Ries and Jack Trout (read a sample or watch an animated video summary of the book).
In The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Ries and Trout say that one of the most powerful concepts in marketing is to “own a word in the prospect’s mind.” Not a complicated one—on the contrary—the simpler, the better. “You ‘burn’ your way into the mind by narrowing the focus to a single word or concept.” This is the idea behind their Law No. 5: The Law of Focus.
“Federal Express put the word overnight into the minds of its prospects because it sacrificed its product line and focused on overnight package delivery only.” You too can put this law to the test by doing a simple word association exercise: what comes to mind when you hear the words “copier, chocolate bar and cola? The [three] most associated words are Xerox, Hershey’s and Coke.”
Owning a word in the prospect’s mind is so strong of a foothold, that the word becomes a generic name—and sometimes even a verb—for the category.
As examples of this, we have Kleenex for facial tissues, Chapstick for lip balm, Post-its for sticky notes, and Google for Internet search. (Here’s a fun list of generic and genericized trademarks that you can use to amuse your friends at your next cocktail party.)
Further, you can solidify your position in the prospect’s mind if you isolate the most important attribute of your product or service. Heinz owns the word ketchup, yet the most important attribute it also owns is slow (“Slowest ketchup in the West”), because it takes very long to slide out. This has generated lots of tips and tricks to be able to get this beloved condiment out of the bottle and onto our food… to the tune of 10+ million results (!) if you Google how to get ketchup out of the bottle. (Did you notice I just used Google as a verb? That’s the Law of Focus at your service.)
As an added bonus, there’s the halo effect that comes with the word you choose. “If you strongly establish one benefit, the prospect is likely to give you a lot of other benefits too. A ‘thicker’ spaghetti sauce [Prego] implies quality, nourishing ingredients, value and so on [so much so, that big brands will go to court to defend their chosen words]. A ‘safer’ car [Volvo] implies better design and engineering.”
Now that you know this, what word will you choose to apply the Law of Focus in your prospect’s mind?
ACTION
TODAY: Think of the words that represent your product or service—or even the words that represent yourself if you are looking at creating a brand for you. Start making a list. Make a second list of the attributes that go with those words. These two lists will take a bit of time to develop, as you want to get the best word to represent you.
FUTURE: Get together with some of you colleagues or friends, and brainwrite to add to the lists that you had started. Besides the dictionary, a book that can help enormously with this is Words That Sell by Rick Bayan, as well as its sequel, More Words That Sell. Then vote on the words and select the one word + attribute that will differentiate you from your competition and position you solidly in your prospect’s mind.
Know someone who needs to find the one word? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Creativity, Growth, Marketing, Planning, Sales
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 20 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The optimal way to keep your customers happy
— From Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur, by Derek Sivers.
What is your business’ mission? Are all the policies and procedures in your business designed and geared toward fulfilling its mission? How about the tiniest of details? Hmm… this is usually the last part to get attention because it’s easy to overlook or to simply be as vanilla as everyone else… yet the optimal way to keep your customers happy is by paying attention to the smallest of details.
Let me share with you the story of Derek Sivers, Founder of CD Baby, a company that sells indie music online. When an order for a music CD had shipped, he had a standard email message to notify his customers and to thank them for their business. However, his mission was to make people smile, and that message felt completely incongruent. So, he took 20 minutes and wrote this instead:
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
I bet it achieved its mission of making you smile! It’s silly, funny, and adorable—all at the same time—and it’s also incredibly smart as a way to convey CD Baby’s mission and brand personality. As a matter of fact, if you Google private CD Baby jet you’ll see that, as of the date of this post, there are 1,010,000 results that reference this email (and when I publish this it’ll be 1,010,001 and counting…).
Clearly, Sivers could not have anticipated this outcome when he wrote his email. Yet being true to his mission—even in the smallest of details—endeared the company to its customers and “that one goofy email created thousands of new customers.”
“When you’re thinking of how to make your business bigger, it’s tempting to try to think all the big thoughts and come up with world-changing massive-action plans. But please know that it’s often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you.”
ACTION:
TODAY: Take that one tiny detail about your business that bugs you… yes, that one… We all have that one little thing that drives us crazy (and that we tend to overlook because it’s so tiny that we think we should not give it all that much importance). Now is the time. What do you need to do to make that one detail congruent with your mission? What is your equivalent of Derek Sivers’ taking 20 minutes to write his email to make his customers smile?
FUTURE: Make an inventory of all the touch points in your business’ customer journey. What can you do to make sure every single touch point is congruent and reflects your mission in the most favorable way? Map out and list the actions that you need to take to ensure this happens, then get to work on them. The result will be a stronger bond with your clients, greater loyalty and increased sales. Well worth it, don’t you think?
Know someone that could use a smile from Derek Sivers’ funny email? Please share this post with that person via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Marketing, Mindset, Resources, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 22 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
How to turn any venture into an admired brand
— From: Bigger Than This: How to turn any venture into an admired brand by Fabian Geyrhalter
Since I love marketing and the creativity behind it, I’m always delighted to hear how companies brand themselves. The media likes this too, and frequently we hear the branding stories about startups with innovative concepts or products becoming beloved brands, as people flock to purchase whatever they’re selling.
Rarely, if at all, do we hear about companies that sell commodities turning them into beloved brands. That is, until now. Branding Guru Fabian Geyrhalter, author of How to Launch a Brand, recently published his second book, Bigger Than This. In it, he details 8 principles that help companies who sell commodities (“products and services that have remained widely unchanged”) turn their brands around to tell empathic stories that resonate with their existing tribes and create new raving fans.
Here are the 8 principles. Follow one or follow all to position your brand strongly:
1. Tell your story. Stories are memorable and relatable. “They flip the intangible into something tangible, the unrelated into something emotional.”
2. Believe in something and be vocal about it. “Any brand can stand for something meaningful, but to do that it has to define and embody its values.” And the values need to be aligned with those of the customers and the community.
3. Root for a cause. “Identify a social cause that can be activated in an authentic way to manifest that the purpose of the product/service goes deeper than solely generating sales.”
4. Connect with your heritage. We all like to anchor ourselves to different places because we feel a sense of connection or belonging. “Connect your product with the desire of consumers to formulate a deeper connection with the place your brand will be known for.”
5. Be delighted to delight customers. “A small, unexpected gesture will lead to them seeing [your brand] as a friend.”
6. Be transparent. “Create a strategic plan on how far you will take the idea of transparency and where your brand will draw the line.”
7. Stand in solidarity with your customers. “Only deep and honest empathy will touch people’s hearts long term. A quote from Alan Alda in the book says, “… focusing on the other person’s need and not my own was the most effective way to make a sale.”
8. Customize if possible. “Start simply by using your collected customer data to create personal experiences surrounding your customer service or product interactions. Customization can start a small as that and grow from there.”
Finally, the book leaves you with this short and helpful template for a “simple positioning statement to derive the bigger story,” and it instructs to “put extra emphasis in deriving your ‘because’—your reason to believe.”
“To [target audience]
our product is the [category]
that provides [functional, symbolic or emotional benefits]
because [support/reasons to believe].”
ACTION
TODAY: Take a look at what you do or what you sell. Could your brand benefit from any of the principles above? If so, identify the one that you can start implementing today (even if just with one tiny action). Note that these principles could also apply to a personal brand. What does your online image say about you in the various social media platforms that you have? How can you tell your story in the best light possible to resonate with those you lead?
FUTURE: Run both your business and personal brands through the above principles and template. Both brands will come out stronger and better positioned to suit your goals.
Let me know if you’d like me to put together an online branding session (at no cost, of course). I know a few branding gurus and will gladly invite them to share their knowledge with us via Facebook Live or a webinar or video chat. I think we could all benefit from hearing experts in the field as to how to position our business and personal brands in a stronger way. Shoot me an email to let me know if you’re in, and I will plan accordingly if this idea gains traction. Fingers crossed!
Know someone who might like this post? Please share it via email, Facebook or Twitter!
by Helena Escalante | Growth, Marketing, Mindset, Resources, Sales
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 48 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA:
How to apply the Law of the Category to your benefit.
— From The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! by Al Ries and Jack Trout (read a sample or watch an animated video summary of the book).
“What’s the name of the third person to fly the Atlantic Ocean solo? If you didn’t know that Bert Hinkler was the second person to fly the Atlantic, you might figure you had no chance at all to know the name of the third person. But you do. It’s Amelia Earhart. Now, is Amelia known as the third person to fly the Atlantic Ocean solo, or as the first woman to do so?”
You just witnessed in action one of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, the Law of the Category:
“If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.”
As professionals, we are constantly selling either products, services, or our efforts (say, our work to our boss) and we tend to focus on “better.” But better naturally brings a comparison: better than what? Better than X we say. And then a further comparison ensues. Ok, better than X, but can you top Y? The bar is constantly being raised to unattainable levels if we just focus on better, better, better. Let’s think new instead.
Marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout say that while “everyone talks about why their brand is better… prospects have an open mind when it comes to categories. Everyone is interested in what’s new. Few people are interested in what’s better.”
By promoting the category you are first in, you can differentiate yourself from the competition. And since every category has a leader, you can become this way the market leader in your category.
So, what category are you first in? Let me know in the comments!
ACTION
TODAY: Figure out what category you are first in. If you sell a product or service this should not be difficult, as what differentiates you from the competition is a way to define your category. If you are not in sales directly, you can create your own category in the work that you do. Are you the first to try some new strategy or method? Or the first to try out some new technology? Or the first to teach something to someone? There are so many firsts that come to mind! What can you do that can give you a leg up, and create a category of “you did this first” in the mind of the people you report to? If you can’t come up with anything, check out this post: There is no such thing as a shortage of ideas or ping me and I can help.
FUTURE: One of the ways in which you can constantly create value is by reinventing yourself, your business/work, and your categories. Make a point to review your categories at least twice a year. Are you still dominant in the one you chose? If so, congrats and keep on going. Are you still dominant but many competitors are trying to snatch your title? Come up with another, complimentary category. That way you’ll have the strength of the first one plus the additional one, and this will certainly be a further differentiator in your clients’ minds.
Know someone who can benefit from reading this post? Please share it with them via email, Facebook or Twitter — thanks a lot!
