I saw Leonard the other day, and he started the conversation off like he always does; “what are your thoughts about storing data in the cloud, like Google or Dropbox or something?  My clients would have a problem with that so I keep all of their data in house.”

Leonard is a business attorney I’ve known for years, stemming from a board we were both members of.  He thinks he’d be making a big mistake by trusting his data in the hands of an outsourced entity. “If you put it on Google or Dropbox, it’s out there!” he’ll say.  Yes, it is.  But the truth is it’s out there even on your hard drive in your office if that device is connected to a computer that is connected to the Internet – which it most likely is.

Knowing what I know – that Leonard’s extent of data security knowledge goes as far as his ability to plug in his little external hard drive his IT guy gave him – I’d have a huge problem if that is the way he handled my critical information.  I’d trust the engineers at Google and Dropbox or in a data center handling managed services before I’d trust Leonard and his IT guy.

In our conversation, Leonard agreed that outsourced vendors probably do have better security, given the fact that it’s what they do for their lives (whew, a milestone). So when I asked why he still wouldn’t trust a 3rd party, it boiled down to because his clients would have a problem knowing that.  I get it.  His clients still think like he did (oh no, it’s ‘in the cloud’!).  Well, regardless of their perception, isn’t it Leonard’s fiduciary responsibility (watch out for the legal terminology!) to make sure his clients’ information is safe, regardless of what they think?

Pretend Leonard’s clients’ data was compromised (actually much more likely to happen under his in house system).  In the court of law, I wonder how a judge would rule if Leonard admitted to me he chose to store his client’s critical and sensitive information on his external hard drive when he knew about Google and Dropbox and managed services. I’m willing to bet it would go bad for Leonard.

Here are some links to articles discussing how the courts are starting to pay attention to “standards of practice”:

Negligence Liability for Breaches of Data Security

Assessing risk: Data breach litigation in U.S. courts

I learned the following powerful formula from my sales coach and friend, Steve Parry:

(C + R + I) ÷ PSI = Trust

Where:
C = credibility
R = reliability
I = intimacy
PSI =  perceived self interest

So how do you put numbers to this equation?  You don’t.  The take away lesson is that the PSI, or your perceived self interest (key word “perceived”), is what you need to watch because of the effect it has on trust.  The lower your perceived self interest (PSI), the higher the trust goes up. The higher your PSI, the lower the trust.  As you focus on helping the other person and forget about what you’re going to get, the higher your counterpart’s trust will be.

Do you have any stories where somebody didn’t trust you because you showed too much of your self interest?  Tell me about it!

Finding and Leveraging Narrow Niches for Low Cost Lead Generation

“Oh boy… a RFP!  I get to do a lot of research and consulting for free, with very little chance of winning the deal!!”  Is this not the thought that really comes to your mind when an RFP comes to you?  After reading the RFP you come away with tons of questions because the whole project seems very vague.  It is because the prospect, 9 times out of 10, doesn’t know what they really need (wants are not the same as needs).

The prospect will pick the proposal that most closely matches the prospect’s “needs”, correct? Well then, why would they want a proposed solution that isn’t in complete alignment with their company’s goals and objectives? With an RFP, that is what they are going to get.

When I have a prospect that asks for proposals, the most helpful thing I can do is to help them understand that they most likely have not done enough planning because if the plan was solid enough, the only thing left to do is to find the people to implement.  And of course, implementation is really the easy part and the costs go way down when you are very specific in the work that needs to be done.

So to get out of doing proposals (that I won’t win), and to position myself as a trusted advisor in the eyes of the prospect, I attempt to get the prospect to back off of the RFP and consider hiring somebody (me) to do a strategic planning process with them (yes, a proposal – but one that is in complete alignment with their overall goals and objectives).  However, it’s something that you get paid to do, allows you to get in the door with a small project, and is a way for you to truly bond with the client and get to know them and their business extremely well.

Unless you have a small team of elves that come out at night and write proposals for you, don’t do them.

I have a tendency to get in the way of my own success.  However, I implemented a system that removed me – i.e. my head trash – from the process.  Now I use a system that is an autopilot. Now I coast to the end.

I’ve always hated the saying “if you don’t plan to succeed, you automatically plan to fail.”  That was so much pressure.  As if I can just sit down with a pen and some paper and plan myself to more time, money and better health!?! Well, I actually stepped out of my comfort zone and on faith implemented a method that was recommended to me by many successful people through the years and I’m happy to report that…. IT WORKS.  It’s a process that doesn’t make me have to be self disciplined (other than just initially committing to do it).  Also, it’s not limited to just one goal.  I now use this process for all the goals of my life.

1.  Determine the High Impact Situations You Need More Of

Every accomplished goal had a series of situations that happened before the end result was realized.  Most likely you know exactly what these high impact situations you need more of are.  Some examples are:

• face to face meetings with decision makers
• interviews
• telephone conversations
• referrals
• introductions
• high impact situations for people you manage

High impact situations involve the help of somebody else and which you can’t directly control and is usually the step right before, or very close to, the realization of the goal.  Concentrate on only a few.

2.  List the Repetitive Activities that Lead to High Impact Situations

For the job seeker, sending out resumes and filling out online job applications will lead to more interviews.  For the salesperson, activities like outbound calling and networking with centers of influence will be good things to do that will lead to more face to face meetings with decision makers, right?  Perhaps the CEO of a company who’s tasked with turning around poor sales should be consistently interviewing sales consultants, or masterminding with other CEO’s.  Whatever the high impact situations you need more of, ask yourself “what activities should I be doing consistently that will ultimately help accomplish more of those situations?”

List as many activities that would lead to high impact situations that you can think of and then pick no more than five activities that YOU can do – i.e. what you can control.  For instance, while it would be beneficial for the job seeker to have more interviews, the job seeker can’t control how many interviews he/she will get invited to.  However, the job seeker can send letters, spend 15 minutes improving the resume, or applying for jobs. Some examples might include:

• outbound phone calls (dials)
• networking events
• tweets, facebook posts, linkedin introductions
• blog posts
• correspondence sent
• job application

Perhaps you don’t know what the BEST activities are. That’s okay.  Don’t get hung up.  Through this process the most rewarding activities for you will surface to the top from our process of tracking results (explained below). Just get down a few.

3.  Create a Weighted Point System

If everyday I do the repetitive activities that leads to the important high-impact situations, will I not be making significant progress to accomplish my goal?  In the past, my problem was not knowing how many activities to do, and I would often not get much done, of any significance anyway.  At the very least, my lack of a system was extremely inefficient, not to mention disheartened at knowing I was not accomplishing anything.  I never knew how much work was enough. Today, my sales and marketing activities goal is to get 25 points per day and I weight and assign all of my activities according to the type of results I get.  For instance, while cold calls are proven and would be able to generate sales leads for me, I would have to make a lot more of them to equal the value of a meeting with somebody face to face.  So, now I get 5 points for meeting with somebody, and only 1 point for a dial (the act of trying to reach somebody on the phone), and 2 points for a (meaningful) phone conversation.  And when I attend a networking event – an activity I frequently found myself not doing frequently enough – I now get 4 points; a strongly weighted activity.

Look over your list of repetitive activities that leads to the important high-impact situations and assign points to those activities that would add up to 25 points.  However, make sure you’re properly balancing the scoring system so that you’re not done for the day after one phone call, and likewise, you can be done early if you’ve honestly put in a respectable amount of work.  Here is my list of my activities and their points:

• 1 pt – review vision board
• 1 pt – dial/tweet/fb post/email
• 3 pts – conversation (phone, twitter, fb)
• 5 pts – face to face meeting
• 3 pts – call/meeting scheduled
• 4 pts – networking event
• 4 pts – marketing asset created (blog post/sales proposal)
• 2 pts – give freely/help somebody

Want to earn some extra points and help balance out your life a little bit?  Put down “exercise/healthy eating” as one of your activities and give yourself some nominal points for either working out or staying on a healthy diet for that day.  Being healthy leads to the best you and you should be rewarded for it!  In my 25 per day point system I give myself 2 points.

4.  If You Track It, You’ll Do It!

So you’ve determined what activities you need to do consistently that leads to important high-impact situations.  You’ve also created a way that will help you know how much you should be doing on a daily basis to continually move your toward accomplishing your goal.  Now we have to actually get to work, which was something I’ve tended to fight. Wouldn’t it would be great if we could drink some sort of an elixir everyday that somehow made us wake up at 2 in the afternoon with all of our activities completed?  Well, I haven’t found one yet, and would be concerned for my health even if there was.  However, my tracking sheet is what I use now and is just as effective.

The tracking sheet is a one page document I print every Monday morning and put right in front of my on my desk (important).  For every activity I do I track.  When I have 25 points accumulated for the day, I’m done. The track-it sheet is merely a spreadsheet with your activities listed vertically on the left, and the day of the week across to the top.  Make it so that you can print it out on one page.

I recommend you add to the tracking mechanism “success metrics”.  Examples of my success metrics are:

• nibble (somebody who raises their hand for my offering)
• new opportunity
• no/killed opportunity (yes, getting a “no” is good)
• future call
• referral/introduction
• money event

The most important part is that you have your tracking mechanism in front of you at all times because you will find that you will naturally do your work without having to think about it.  So every Monday morning you should print out your “Track-It Sheet” and put it right in front of you.  Now your activities get done without having to beat yourself up!

Download My Track-It Sheet

If you’ve had troubles getting to a major goal because you know you aren’t focused on the activities you need to do to get you there, I recommend trying this “Success Trap”.  Let me know how it works.  How have you changed it to work better?  I’d love to hear from you!

Turnover Percentage

A ______________ How many people have you hired in the past five years?

B ______________ Number of salespeople that have left or have been let go in the past five years

C ______________ Turnover percentage (%) = (B/A) x 100

Cost of Interviewing

D ______________ Approximate number of people interviewed

E ______________ Average time of interviews (hrs)

F ______________ Value of your time and/or HR costs ($ per hour)

G ______________ Cost of Interviewing ($) = D x E x F

Cost of Payroll

H ______________ Average base salary you pay salespeople ($/month)

I  ______________ Average length of employment of salespeople no longer with company (months)

J ______________ Cost of Payroll ($) = B x H x I

Cost of Sales Training

K ______________ Approximate time invested in training, managing and coaching one salesperson (hours)

L ______________ Average cost of outside training per salesperson ($)

M ______________ Cost of Training ($) = (K x F x B) + (L x B)

Miscellaneous Hard Costs

N ______________ Recruiter fees paid ($)

O ______________ Cost of leads ($)

P ______________ Cost of phones bills and/or contact lists ($)

Q ______________ Advances and/or commissions paid in advance on non-collected accounts ($)

R ______________ Cost of travel and /or reimbursed expenses ($)

S ______________ Miscellaneous Hard Costs ($) = N + O + P + Q +R

Total Costs

________________ Total Cost of Sales Duds ($) = G + J + M + S

It can be frustrating to know what “sales duds” have cost you, but at least you have a benchmark that will help you know what you can invest to fix the problem.  If you would like better results, contact me.

The barrier to entry in the web development and internet marketing space is low <in any space it’s low>, which makes vetting website and Internet consultants very difficult <with any consultant it’s difficult>.  Watch this quick video to learn how to vet website development and Internet marketing consultants <the principles apply to any consultant>.

How to Vet Website Development & Internet Marketing Consultants from Scott Smeester on Vimeo.

What do you think? What have you learned?