Marketing

We’re going to travel back in time today … all the way back to 1968 and the release of the album “Beggars Banquet” by The Rolling Stones.

Why? To understand a little bit more about sales and marketing. You see, when something like a song becomes a classic, there’s a very good reason why. It’s because it strikes a chord with us. It tells a story. Imparts great knowledge.

It contains ideas that fit neatly into the collective consciousness.

Finding Success in Success

The formula goes like this: It takes a certain mindset to be successful (and The Rolling Stones have been very successful). And so, anything that comes out of a successful person’s mind has the great potential to create more success.

Knowing that, I’m going to take the first four lines of the song “Sympathy for the Devil”, and apply them to sales and marketing …

Read more

No matter what you’re doing – communication, networking, and having the ability to “sell it” is key to success. Your ideas, discussions, speeches, ramblings, sales pitches; they all have to have an impact. They have to stick.

Well, Chip Heath and Dan Heath wrote the authoritive book on the subject. It’s called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. In the book, they map out 6 principles for making your ideas stick and it’s filled with great stories, real experiences, urban legends; the works.

So here’s a 6 day challenge for you. Take the principles from Made to Stick and concentrate on one of them each day; throughout the day. Whatever you’ve got to say, write, or convey to others, use the principles to do it and make your ideas stick …

Read more

First off, welcome to all of you who are recent Zoomstart subscribers. This post, in a roundabout way, is about you. Read on …

After starting Zoomstart last year and blogging away for about 9 months, I managed to gain about 200 subscribers. I stopped writing for a few months because of other commitments, and then about a month ago I started writing again. And in the last month my subscriber count has rocketed up to around 300.

Okay, those don’t seem like earth shattering numbers, but a 50% gain in subscribers in one month compared to the results of the entire previous year is very significant. Annualized, it’s a 600% increase year over year.

Don’t Focus on the Goal … Focus on the Result

The reason for this big increase in Zoomstarters is because I focused the blog (theme design, etc) on results rather than goals.

Err … what’s the difference?

Read more

It’s well known in politics; if you say three things, you say nothing.

We’re all bombarded with ideas all day long. What we need, what we’re looking for, is an idea that jumps out at us. A single understanding so extraordinary that everything else around it suddenly ceases to exist.

So profound in its simplicity and still … still, it has the ability to describe an entire world to us. An idea so loud, so clear, so universally understood that it can’t be mistaken for anything else … ladies and gentlemen, I give you, “jaws on paws”.

? … Dude, you’re losing it. Okay, let me explain …

Millions of Dollars are Made Everyday with Single Sentences

In 1975, a little director made a little movie based on a book. The director’s name was Steven Spielberg and the movie was Jaws (which became the highest grossing movie ever at the time).

In 1983, another book was turned into a movie. It wasn’t an easy idea to pitch if you try to flesh out all the ideas the story involved. But it was successfully pitched, and made, and enjoyed moderate success.

The movie was Cujo; Stephen King’s rabid dog horror flick and it was sold with three simple but powerful words. Jaws on paws.

Million dollar deals are made every day and the best ones are locked in with a single sentence.

Read more

My buddy’s brother made an amateur film called Crackass: The Surrey Movie. Just a guy with a handycam and a group of do-anything friends. The movie’s not going to win any big awards, but along with some truly disgusting Jackass-style stunts, there is some real value to it from a documentary perspective.

So how do you sell a flick like this anyway?

Well, here’s one of the things he did. Figuring that his old highschool was a good targeted demographic, he called up the school and announced that he was going to be there at a specific time on a specific day selling his movie. Then he called up the local TV news channels and the local newspapers and told them too.

Oh, yeah … and the other thing he told all of them was this; as a publicity stunt for the event, he was gonna have a stunt guy there set himself on fire.

Read more