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Create Your Own Rumors
A consultant new in the city asked me how I managed to get business so fast. Working for that marketing company definitely gave me a jump start. That's because I already knew about press releases. Only in business a few months and I already had been in two of the local papers. However, it was my male mentors who introduced me to telemarketing. At the suggestion of calling strangers on the phone was enough to terrify me. There was no way I could just dial up people and sell myself like a product. I was sure people would hang up. I insisted that I could not do it. Tim termed it "telephonitis." Yes, that was it; I was scared of the telephone to use it in that way. I was given this advice. Don't sell yourself, sell your company. Look at the company as a separate entity. Pretend you are telling people about your company. Okay, I agreed to give it a try. I failed miserably. I stuttered, forgot what I was going to say and hung up on many people. Thank goodness, the phones back then didn't have that return call back button. But I did realize that this is a great way to do marketing so I had to come up with a plan to jump this big boulder on my journey's path. I remembered back a few short weeks ago, when I answered the phone and was told by a female voice she was a college student, and was doing a survey. I did not feel she was being intrusive and answered her questions. At the end of the survey, she was very friendly and thanked me for my time. Therefore based with that memory, I decided to try a new approach to my telephonitis. My first call was made to an accounting firm. I advised the voice on the line that I was a student doing research and did she have time to answer a few questions. The voice returned a polite yes. I had prepared a list of ten questions about her job title, did she work with a computer, the programs she worked on, etc. When finished, I thanked her for her time and hung up. You see with funds being limited, I needed to send flyers only to those who had computers. What I now possessed was a target market, As I got bolder with my surveys, I discovered that people were friendly and I could interject other stuff. Many times, they were frustrated with their computer or their computer consultant. Bingo, I then would tell them all about this person I heard that had a great reputation. I would go on and on about how this consultant has many clients and they all just love her. Of course I was telling them about myself. It worked like a charm for me. Therefore I started my own rumors, and created my own tactic in the game. ### Gina Novelle (copyright 12-2004) Gina Novelle is a published free lance writer. Her company sponsors the web site http://www.thirdpocket.com, a support site for the self-employed. Her book, "Business Secrets Men Don't Tell Women" reveals how women and men view self-employment differently and will be available in 2005. She currently offers her services as an Ezine Writer to optimize search engine ratings. gina@exclusivemarkets.net
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Sell Big Ticket Items Now! - 1 Simple Step To Keep Your Fears From Holding YOU Back
First, some background on today's topic. I've had a terrible week. Not
terrible as in I got nothing done because I did actually get quite a bit done.
But man, I struggled. And I didn't even really understand why.
I have to admit, most of what I got done happened between Thursday and Sunday.
Have you ever had a week like that where you struggled to get things done?
Or worse yet, struggled and didn't get anything done? Or maybe it just FELT LIKE
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I hate weeks like that and I rarely feel that way. So why was this week
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short, nothing really clicked as the cause for the way I was feeling and acting.
So then I decided to do what I always do when I am trying to solve a problem. I
just kinda let it go for a while and did something else.
And THEN, I finally figured out what the problem was!
It wasn't anything specific about THIS week. It was related to something I had
done several weeks ago. And it's very ironic that this was the cause of my
problem.
You see, several weeks ago I had drafted my 90 marketing plan. This document
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period.
It's actually not that hard to figure out but it is something that you need to
track closely and see which weeks of marketing effort have the biggest payoff.
In other words, you want to track which things you did that resulted in the
biggest payoff in sales, opt-ins by potential customers, joint ventures,
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Basically all the stuff we need to do to as part of our Big Ticket Marketing
efforts. We want to repeat those things that give us the largest payoff in our
next 3 month marketing plans and drop those things that didn't work out. And of
course we always try new things that we think will work, as well.
Anyway, the reason that I was struggling and feeling like I wasn't accomplishing
this week was because...
I was in OVERWHELM!
I had a lot of tasks I wanted to accomplish, because I'm an ambitious guy. I
want to do well and I have a lot of goals I want to reach. This is all fine, but
the point of having a 90 day marketing plan is so that it will be easy to focus
on the specific set of tasks that I need to accomplish each week by focusing on
ONLY ONE main area each week.
And normally, this system is very effective at keeping me focused. But,
ironically, the act of creating the 90 day marketing plan made me look at
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Have you ever experienced that?
I think we all have at one point or another.
However, I am disappointed that I didn't recognize what was going on sooner. My
background as a software engineer for Microsoft forced me to be pretty
disciplined about focusing on what I needed to do and what our team needed to do
every week to accomplish our goals. And sometimes the ship cycles lasted between
1.5 to 2 years.
Plus I have a black belt in Hapkido (a Korean martial art like a cross between
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practice and long term view. But at the same time requires you to learn and work
on smaller portions of the entire body of techniques, patterns, because that is
the only way you can really learn what you need to know.
Anyway, my point is that I should know better and yet I still fell into the fear
from OVERWHELM. And I think everyone experiences not only overwhelm but other
fears about what they want to do as well.
The title of this article promised you a simple secret to keep your fears from
holding you back - from selling Big Ticket Items. Can you guess what the secret
is?
I'll give you a hint. It's not really a secret at all. In fact everyone knows
about this but unfortunately not everyone knows what to do especially in a case
like overwhelm.
Ready... the secret is ACTION!
Yes, ACTION. Now you are probably wondering... "Hey, wait a sec, you just said
you were in overwhelm, how can action possibly be the secret for that?"
Napoleon Hill, in his book "Think and Grow Rich" said, "Action is the real
measure of intelligence". Thomas Huxley said: "The great end of life is not
knowledge but action." Intelligence means nothing, action means everything.
I knew what I had to do this week and yet I was struggling to do it. I even had
a 90 day marketing plan with each week spelled out for me and yet I was stuck. I
got unstuck when I realized I was overwhelmed and decided to do something about
it. What I decided to do was to take action. But the type of action I decided to
take was influenced by my precious experience both in software development and
martial arts.
Have you heard of Kaizen?
Kaizen is a Japanese word which basically means 'continuous and incremental
improvement'. The word came from when the Japanese were introduced to the work
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Total Quality Management.
What I like about Kaizen is that it takes small action steps over time to solve
problems. The beauty of this approach is that you can take something that
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one small step that you can take to help improve the problem. The small step is
so easy that you bypass your overwhelm and fears and just do that one small
step. Then after a little while you introduce another small step and
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So in this way you CAN take action, even if it is very small, and slowly over
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creates an unstoppable force until your problem has been solved. The fact that
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how much you have to do.
Maybe a short example will help. One of my goals is to increase the readership
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I kept putting this off, because I had a bunch of other stuff I needed to get
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worrying about how many there were.
I still have a long way to go, but my initial goal was to get listed in 20-25
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Plus, Kaizen is really how I study martial arts so the process is very familiar
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little bit each time and before you know it you will have your problem solved.
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amount of satisfaction knowing that you are taking steps to accomplish what you
want to get done... and you'll be doing it almost effortlessly.
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