I just got off the phone with my father. What a wonderful conversation it was. I never envisioned growing up how enjoyable it would be to talk to my father about life and stuff. What a wonderful inspiration he has been to me. I love that man!
This is a tough love post. I interact with a lot of people on and offline every day, and most of them are complaining about how bad their business is, but when I ask them what they are doing to turn it around there is always silence or excuses. The fact is you can’t simply complain about how bad things are and expect them to get better on their own. Below are two things I recommend that you do immediately. These two things are within your control to do no matter how bad things are:
1) Personal Development – Commit to read, listen to, or learn something new each day, but more importantly, commit to immediately implement it within 24 hours of your learning it. Psychologically, making a commitment to personal development changes your entire mood and outlook and people pick up on that. Practically, it’s activity not knowledge that creates power;
2) Mastermind – Find a small group (no more than 8 including you) of other business professionals to brainstorm and collaborate with. I recommend you choose businesses that are complimentary to yours because it will present the best opportunities for cross referring business to each other, and for doing joint marketing campaigns that save the entire group money.
These things can have an immediate impact on your business fortunes but you must take immediate action if you want to see it happen. If you have any questions about how to get started on these action items pick up the phone and call me. 800-306-6488, Ext. 101.
Check out http://www.tweetmeme.com. This service provides a powerful way to slice and dice data coming out of Twitter. It searches links embedded in tweets and pulls the actual content into a nicely organized database that makes it better than Google results for getting news.
I never thought I would come across a book that was more powerful than “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, but I found that “Click” by George C. Fraser blew away that thought. There are two books that I feel every serious business networker should read cover to cover, over and over. One of them is “The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann. The other is “Click”.
I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy Click, since I thought at the time I had read everything anyone could ever say on building relationships, but I knew I was in for a treat when I had tabbed and highlight 9 pages out of an 18 page introduction. Wow! I could have stopped there and felt I had gotten my money’s worth.
Click lays out 10 truths for building extraordinary relationships and it delivers what it advertises and much more. Click is not the type of book you will read in one sitting. There’s simply too much wisdom in it to digest it all at once. Frankly, it’s the kind of book to be savored one chapter at a time. It’s that powerful.
Do yourself a favor a grab a copy of this one now! Of course, you should have already completed your read of The Go-Giver, so between these two you will be light years ahead of schedule in your ability to build extraordinary relationships.
“A gossip is one that talks to you about others; a bore is one who talks to you about himself; and a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself”. Lisa Kirk
Which one of these best describes your chat activity with others? Determining this may give you some insight into why you are or are not successful in attracting people who are a good fit for you. Learn how to take a sincere interest in others and they will take a sincere interest in you.
“You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success.” – Zig Ziglar
Price is almost never the true of objection to whether to make a purchase. We have all seen something we wanted, found a way to come up with the money if we wanted it bad enough, and even rationalized the utility of having it in order to justify our decision to make the purchase. So, typically, price is not the reason you decide not to buy. It’s value.
The only problem is many opportunities that come our way are lost if we don’t see an immediate value in it. This is especially true when it comes to investing in our businesses. Just as in the case of an impulse decision to buy something we want, that gets justified later through whatever mind games we put ourselves through, we often engage in the same games when it comes to making the decision not to make a purchase.
If you are one who likes to be honest with yourself try applying an honest process to all of your purchasing decisions, and especially those you on investing in your business. Here’s a process I recommend that you follow sincerely:
1) Get all the information about the thing before attempting to make a decision to invest or not invest.
2) Investigate and ask questions to clarify how you would benefit in your business if you did choose to make the investment.
3) Evaluate the value you will receive from the investment before you consider the cost.
4) Evaluate the cost only in light of the value the investment will return and not just on what you will be out of pocket today.
Once you have completed the process you will find that coming up with the financial resources will become easier because if you believe the purchase should be made there is almost always a way to figure out the financing.
If you apply this process to decisions to invest in your business you will find yourself missing fewer opportunities, and if you apply it in your decision to make purchases in your personal life you’ll have the financial resources to invest in your business.
The Go-Giver, written by Bob Burg, and John David Mann, has to be one of the best books ever written on the subject of relationships, especially business relationships. I have been so impacted by this book that it forms the foundation of the philosophies we endorse at the Relationship Marketing Center.
The book is written as an enjoyable parable that really drills home some important rules for being the kind of person that attracts quality people. You can read this book in one evening, but you will find the wisdom that you get from it affecting your attitude about dealing with people every day of your life.
Grab a copy and read the story carefully. I promise it will make a difference in your life.
I know I haven’t posted here in about two weeks and I thought I would break the drought today. I am excited to say that I’m working on a little project that is going to transform my ability to deliver training content and breaking news and information relating to relationship marketing.
This site will be moving to a new domain in order to facilitate the launch of this new project, and I hope you will find our transformation to be a convenient way for you to find what you need to make your relationship building productive. Stay tuned folks!
“There ain’t no free lunches in this country. And don’t go spending your whole life commiserating that you got the raw deals. You’ve got to say, ‘I think that if I keep working at this and want it bad enough I can have it.’ It’s called perseverance.”
Lee Iacocca
Businessman and Former CEO of Chrysler
We live in a world where immediate gratification is an expectation which is why most of us have such a short attention span for what it takes to achieve true success. Results distinguish the successful from the mediocre. If everyone got immediate results everyone would be doing it and it probably wouldn’t be worth doing. It’s actually the fact that not everyone can get immediate results that drives truly successful people to go out and make things happen.
Are you willing to apply yourself long enough to get results worthy of your effort? It’s okay if you are not, most people will not. But, if you are willing you can be truly successful.