STEPS TO ABUNDANCE - A Weekly Newsletter Published
by Jim Rivas
Release
Date: February 7, 2007 |
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Marketing
Corner
Marketing is the tactical and strategic activity you undertake to acquire new customers and new business from existing customers.
In one of my prior technology businesses, Showmaster! Systems, my top sales guy was from Puerto Rico. Although educated in New Orleans at Loyola University, Xavier still thought in Spanish, and converted to English as he spoke.
Although his English was real good, you could tell every now and then that he was thinking in Spanish. How? He would make grammatical errors putting nouns, adjectives, and verbs out of order. And sometimes you would hear him utter what he was thinking in Spanish, and then spit it out in English.
I then got the chance to hear him speaking in Spanish. I was surprised … he was passionate and colorful in his tone and emphasis. If you have never watched two people speak in their native Spanish tongue, make it a point of observing it. It is a very animated dialect.
When Xavier spoke English it lacked the color and zip. As a result, he was shaky at best in front of the crowd in the board rooms. He could not just “wing it” like me. So we got him a fancy power point presentation and some other high end promotional materials.
When I was looking into Home Based Business opportunities, I ran into so many “deer in the headlamps” associates that I wondered if there was anyone in the industry that had mastered it. They reminded me of Xavier … thinking in one language, and having to convert to the new language on the fly. Most of them sounded very awkward and unsure of themselves.
The processes were clunky at best. Go to a call, without any preparation, listen to how GREAT everything was, and then they would 3-way you to some “closer” and ask you to sign up.
I used to think to myself, “this would never fly in Corporate America”. Good companies wanted a strong pitch, then they wanted to test your resolve, and at the end they wanted to do “due diligence” on your company.
When I got into home business, I never subscribed to the existing rules. So I simply brought in the concepts and systems approach from a successful technology/publishing business, and used them in my home business. They worked better than anything in history ever had in direct sales.
In an attempt to continuously improve what we are doing we have refined our process to the point of almost complete automation. In other words part of your marketing process is disclosing your business and products. In home based business, have a uniform platform where you can bring your clients to literally do all of the selling and telling for them, it will give new associates (or those that think in Spanish) the ability to shine. To see an example of this visit ThreeSteps.info.
The New Game of business and marketing is personal. Be sure everything you are doing is personal, and “people friendly”. Make it easy on your customers, and watch your results climb.
Jim
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